The court has reasons that reason doesn't understand

MADISON, Wis. - A state appeals court on Thursday rejected a lawsuit by a boy who wanted to compete on his high school's girls' gymnastics team.

The District 4 Court of Appeals upheld a judge's dismissal of Keith Michael Bukowski's lawsuit against the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, which has a rule prohibiting boys from competing in girls' sports...

Courts have previously ruled that letting boys compete on girls' teams jeopardizes opportunities for girls. But Bukowski, who had competed in gymnastics at a local YMCA, argued the case was similar to recent examples of girls who were allowed to compete on boys' teams in football and wrestling.

It's interesting how courts find ways to coerce schools into allowing girls to compete in boys sports where the school has no girls' team, but as soon as roles are reversed, a public school can avoid exactly the same argument. The court's argument here, that the government school can follow a discriminatory rule because the rule is established by a voluntary organization is ludicrous. Imagine how quickly the courts would come down on schools who tried to follow a WIAA rule that banned blacks from playing "white" sports.

The court's argument is this: girls can compete for boys teams because to disallow them jeopardizes opportunities for girls. Boys can't compete for girls teams because to allow them jeopardizes opportunities for girls. This is known as equality.

But I remember the very day when I first laughed at the feminist dogma that boys and girls were equal, and that differences in outcome were caused by differences in opportunity. It was the same day I learned what public schools meant by "Equality." I was a senior in high school, and had just signed up with 2 buddies for the intramural 3-line football league.

For those who don't know, 3-line football is touch football played in a gymnasium with three people on each side. The offense gets one series to score a touchdown (no first downs), then the other team gets a shot. You play by time or until one team leads by a pre-determined amount. I was a sissy -CC-> Boy, my friends weren't athletes unless chain-smoking is a sport, but we thought it would be fun to try it even though none of us played football. We knew that we would get slaughtered by several of the guys' teams, who had real honest-to-God football players on them. But hey, that's part of the game.

Now maybe (certainly) our application was a bit late, and maybe (certainly) the gym coach hated one of the guys on my team, but somehow my team, the Hosebags, ended up in the girls' league. I think old Mr. Hart figured we would quit in disgrace. Instead we decided to spite his ugly face and play anyway.

Because teams are self-selected, they are not nearly equal in talent, and one of the girls' teams was made up of a trio that had led our girls' basketball team to the state tournament and would lead a local college team to the national title game a few years hence (in Women's Volleyball, I believe). They were taller than us, in better shape than us, and had played multiple ball-control sports together for several years. Call them Team Amazon. And we were to play them last.

The Hosebags mowed through the lesser girls' teams, as did Team Amazon, and it didn't take long to get around the school that the last game was going to be an intergender battle of undefeateds for the title. Yeah, we were pumped. And we were scared. Though there would have been no shame in losing to the three best multiple-sport female athletes in the school ... no, no excuses, there was no way we were going to lose this game. Our reputations, our very manhood, depended on it.

The day of the big game came. The gym was about half full (about par for a varsity BBall game) and the Hosebags took the floor. And we took the game. We got scored on once or twice, but we scored nearly every time we had the ball and within 10 minutes were so far ahead the girls frankly gave up.

Then Mr. Hart gave them the trophy. They are the champions, my friends.

Lesson learned.