This one got to me today, and thus will produce a rant below:
From Irish Central
A fundamentalist Arizona Catholic high school is refusing to play in a baseball final as their opponent’s team includes a girl on second base.
Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic school, in Phoenix, will forfeit the final rather than play against Mesa Preparatory Academy because 15-year-old Paige Sultzbach is on their team.
The fundamentalist Catholic school is run by the U.S. branch of the Society of Saint Pius X. The group represents conservative, traditional priests who broke from the Catholic Church in the 1980s.
The school’s statement read, “Our school aims to instill in our boys a profound respect for women and girls. Teaching our boys to treat ladies with deference, we choose not to place them in an athletic competition where proper boundaries can only be respected with difficulty.”
Paige’s mother Pamela responded by saying, “This is not a contact sport, it shouldn’t be an issue. It wasn’t that they were afraid they were going to hurt or injure her, it’s that they believe that a girl’s place is not on a field.”
Read more: here
So ya wanna know what I think (said in my deepest Bronx-laden accent)?
I think they’re scared.
I think these misogynist cowards might just be afraid that this girl is better than half of the WIMPS on their team. And they’re too scared to pitch to her, lest she get a hit off of one of their pitchers.
As Tom Hanks would say, “There’s no crying in baseball.”
I played a year of soccer on my high school’s junior varsity team. My school didn’t field a girl’s soccer team and so, Dawn Burns became our goalie. We were horrible. But Dawn made some saves that I know I wouldn’t have made, nor would anyone else have.
On my street the Kosmolsick girls were some of the best athletes around, especially in basketball. My dear childhood friend Donna Bechtold hit a softball one day that still hasn’t landed. And when we played fast pitch stickball, a woman named Stacy hit a tennis ball that flew out of the park so quickly that rocket ships might not have caught up to.
Girls can play too. Sometimes better than us boys.
They call the religion that the protesting school follows a “Fundamentalist Catholic” one. I would challenge that because Catholics are not fundamentalists. In fact, to be fundamentalist is exactly what it means to NOT be Catholic–and it insults centuries of our great intellectual tradition and it’s a fairly new development of thought amongst people who simply want to reform Catholicism to their own brand of what they think Catholicism should become. But I get the author’s thought.
I have another word to describe them. Goofy.
Hey Paige Sultzbach, I hope you understand that not all Catholics would bar you from the right to play a sport you love.
Or serve at the altar. Or be a lector.
You go girl…and keep swinging.
And h/t over to Deacon Greg
