Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is the basic Federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in our nation’s schools and colleges, kindergarten through graduate school. While a few Congressmen from both ends of the political spectrum voted against this omnibus law, there is no record that any opposed Title IX.
When this law was passed, however, Congress carved several exceptions from the comprehensive mandate against sex discrimination, namely, admissions to single-sex schools and colleges, military and merchant marine schools, and seminaries. The persuasive arguments made for these exceptions show clearly that Congress was not willing to acquiesce in demands for a “gender-free” or unisex educational system.
There are more than a hundred all-women’s colleges and a few all-men’s colleges. Congress saw no reason to eliminate freedom of choice to attend those sex discriminatory colleges. Likewise, the law permits colleges to maintain sex-segregated dormitories.
When the Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued its preliminary regulation on Title IX in 1974, it ordered fraternities and sororities to be sex-integrated because fraternities discriminate against girls and sororities discriminate against boys.
Former Congresswoman Edith Green, the original sponsor of Title IX, stated that “it wasn’t designed to do any of this nonsense,” but HEW Secretary Caspar Weinberger argued that the law required it. In record speed, Congress passed an amendment to exclude from Title IX fraternities, sororities, YMCA, YWCA, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, and Boys Clubs.
In 1975 HEW demanded the sex integration of the high school conferences sponsored by the American Legion called Girls State and Boys State. Although no public funds finance this project, HEW claimed control because the Legion is permitted to put its posters on the school bulletin boards. Congress again amended the law to exempt the Legion conferences.
In 1976 HEW banned father-son and mother-daughter events from public schools because they discriminate on account of sex. Congress speedily passed another amendment stating that Title IX “shall not preclude father-son or mother-daughter activities.”
More recently, HEW has created headlines with its contradictory rulings on whether a Connecticut school can’ have an all-boys’ choir, or under what terms.
The purpose of Title IX, according to its author Mrs. Green, was to bring about equality of opportunity for women and to end discrimination in pay in our nation’s schools and colleges. In recent speeches, she has expressed her sad disillusionment with what has happened to Title IX in the hands of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
Mrs. Green said that Title IX was not designed to force the integration by sex of physical education classes, choirs, father-son or mother-daughter banquets, fraternities or sororities. “In each one of these instances,” she said, “the regulation grew out of the fertile imaginative brain of someone in the administrative branch of the government.”
Our experience with Title IX shows clearly that there are many exceptions that reasonable people want in an absolute mandate against sex discrimination. It shows also that, unless restrained by law, the HEW bureaucrats will constantly try to force their unisex goals upon us.
It is time to reevaluate the great power HEW has to withhold Federal funds — a power that forces schools and colleges to comply with mischievous HEW regulations without any rational discussion of alternative methods of achieving desirable goals.
