Hooray for Hootie! At last we have a real man who can resist the histrionics of the pushy feminists. It's so refreshing to know that somewhere there is an American man willing to stand his ground — on any issue — and tell the feminists he is not going to knuckle under to their nagging, extortion, pressure tactics or media tantrums.
William Johnson, known to friends as Hootie, is the president of the Augusta National Golf Club located in northeastern Georgia which has hosted the world's most famous golf tournament, the Masters, ever since 1934. An outfit called the National Council of Women's Organizations (NCWO) has been trying since June to force the all-male golf club to alter its admissions policy and admit women.
Hootie responded by saying the club will not submit to pressure to change its admissions policy from an "outside group with its own agenda." Calling NCWO's tactics "offensive and coercive," he added, "We will not be bullied, threatened or intimidated. We do not intend to become a trophy in their display case."
Bully for Hootie. He probably read the Supreme Court's decision in the Boy Scouts case, wherein the High Court upheld the right of private associations to set their own membership rules.
The New York Times says that Hootie "counterpunched with harsh words and a complete resistance to bowing to the demands." The reporter must have been shocked, shocked that any man has the nerve to resist and counterpunch against the feminists (even though the feminists have been claiming for years that they want to be treated like men instead of ladies).
In July, the NCWO got malicious, going to Coca-Cola, IBM and Citigroup to demand that they terminate their corporate sponsorship of the Masters tournament unless the Augusta National Golf Club changes its policy. The NCWO got easy help from feminist friends in the media: only Hootie, but not the NCWO, was targeted as "defiant" and "angry" by the Associated Press, and as "defiant" and "combative" by the New York Times .
Hootie then announced that the Club would cancel commercial advertising on the televised 2003 Masters tournament in order to protect the corporations from the feminists' wrath. The Masters tournament already gets the highest television ratings, and its fans will no doubt cheer at the delightful prospect of watching a sports event without any commercials.
Maybe Hootie suspected that the corporate executives wouldn't have the stamina to stand up to the feminists. He's probably right. Most corporation executives get wobbly in the knees when the feminists start chanting their mantra "discrimination."
The feminists tried to use Tiger Woods, who won the Masters this year for the third time, as a prop in their publicity stunt to advance their special-interest agenda. When asked what he thinks about Augusta National's rules, Tiger replied with the good sense that has made him a star and a role-model: "They're entitled to set up their own rules the way they want them."
British golfers also kept their eyes on the ball. A spokesman for the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, which runs the British Open at Muirfield where women are excluded as members, commented, "We take the Open to the best links in the British Isles. We don't engage in social engineering."
The Brits, Hootie and Tiger all understand that men's golf is not the same game as women's golf.
Under the Clinton Administration, the feminists made athletics one of the arrows in their campaign to emasculate America. They co-opted Title IX for their own agenda, sabotaging its original purpose of ensuring equal educational opportunity for women and turning it into a weapon to force the abolition of scores of college men's wrestling, track and gymnastics teams.
The feminists have been crowing that recent achievements by women athletes are the happy result of Title IX. But when a reporter asked for a comment on Title IX from Jennifer Capriati, the third best woman tennis player in the world, she replied, "I have no idea what Title IX is. Sorry."
The name of the National Council of Women's Organizations is a misnomer because it's not a "women's" council, it's a feminist council. The women's organizations I belong to wouldn't belong to it.
The NCWO has typical feminist goals such as Barbara Boxer's current passion: ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). NCWO members are probably hoping to be named to CEDAW's Article 17 Committee of "experts" to monitor compliance so they can harass Hootie with UN backing.
NCWO's feminist goals also include affirmative action for women, ratification of the long-defunct Equal Rights Amendment, pro-abortion and pro-gay rights legislation, and government babysitting services. Its goals parallel those of the National Organization for Women and Eleanor Smeal's Feminist Majority, two of its member groups.
