Minority Report

Below I linked to the story about Toni Smith, a brave young woman athlete standing up for what she believes. I think it also important to give acknowledgement to two more female athletes who are standing up for women playing sports everywhere: Donna de Varona and Julie Foudy.

It has been the Bush Administration modus operandi to appoint a "commission" that is stacked with like-minded members to confirm whatever is on the administration's agenda thereby giving it the thinnest patina of legitimacy available, without causing outrage or the threat of waking up a docile and generally compliant, press. Some of the show commissions flamed out spectacularly (revamping Social Security) and some are still stumbling around (the 9/11 commission and the Henry Kissinger debacle). One of these Potemkin commissions is Education Secretary Rod Paige's Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, with the ostensible task of reviewing Title IX. The end result was a predictable attempt to seriously weaken opportunities for female athletes in order to reassert male athletic financial dominance at the collegiate level.

Fortunately de Varona and Foudy (two of the US's more famous and respected athletes) chose to not toe the line, and insisted on issuing a minority report that can be used as a 'backdoor" into all the weaknesses and double-talk of the commissions report. From their introduction:

After careful review and deliberation and unsuccessful efforts to include adequate discussion of our minority views within the majority report, we have reached the conclusion that we cannot join the report of the Commission. We are instead releasing this Minority Report and request that the Secretary include this document in the official records of the Commission’s proceedings.

Our decision is based on (1) our fundamental disagreement with the tenor, structure and significant portions of the content of the Commission’s report, which fails to present a full and fair consideration of the issues or a clear statement of the discrimination women and girls still face in obtaining equal opportunity in athletics; (2) our belief that many of the recommendations made by the majority would seriously weaken Title IX’s protections and substantially reduce the opportunities to which women and girls are entitled under current law; and (3) our belief that only one of the proposals would address the budgetary causes underlying the discontinuation of some men’s teams, and that others would not restore opportunities that have been lost.

This Minority Report is divided into three sections. The first presents the findings and recommendations that we believe the Commission should have included in its report — a substitute report. The second section addresses the reasons that we cannot support a number of the Commission’s key recommendations. The third section identifies some of the problems with the Commission’s process that we believe contributed to the problems with the report and with the recommendations that will weaken Title IX’s protections.

With regard to this last point, in our view, the problems with the report are the result of a process, established by the Commission staff, that did not adequately focus on critical issues, did not compile all of the evidence necessary to fully address the state of gender equity in our nation’s schools, and did not allow sufficient time for Commissioners to conduct either a careful review of the evidence that was compiled or an assessment of the potential impact of various recommendations.

The full Minority Report can be found here (in pdf. format)