You know, for all of the crabbing by some conservatives about Martha Burk and her quest to get the Augusta National Golf Club to admit women, I think I’d rather be on her side of the issue than a Ku Klux Klan splinter group.
“This equal rights stuff has gotten out of hand,” Joseph J. Harper, imperial wizard of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, said Friday. “We’re not concerned with whether they want us there or not. We’re concerned with their right to choose who they want to choose” as members.
Harper wrote the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department on Thursday, requesting a permit to protest during the Masters in April.
I suppose it ruins all the fun to point out that the kind of publicity that a KKKesque protest at an event like the Masters would generate is exactly the sort of thing that gives network executives and corporate sponsors a terminal case of the heebie jeebies, and that their prescription to make it go away is to call Hootie Johnson up and tell him to invite a chick into the club, pronto. Joseph Harper, therefore, is very likely to do exactly what Martha Burk was unable to.
I’m gonna have to buy myself a new Irony-O-Meter, because this story just broke the one I have now.
Mac also picked up on this.
With friends like these…
I’ve got a pretty solid irony meter, so it didn’t break, but I’m going to have to repair a few cracks.
I think the funny thing is that it’s never really been (for most feminists I’ve discussed the issue with, anyway) about their *legal right* to invite who they choose. It’s been about whether it’s *morally right* to not invite women. And maybe if they’d broken the color line without pressure from outside, the Masters folks would have more sympathy this time.
And yes, knowing how golf clubs discriminate against female golfers and knowing how much business my own father did on the links, it cheeses me that Augusta doesn’t admit women. Riverbend, where my dad played, treated women golfers like dirt when I was a girl, but at least they let them play.
Neither side is right in my mind. The KKK is washed up and wants to take advantage of the free publicity they know this will generate. Ms. Burk, on the other hand, is placing demands that she’s free to make, but is way out of place when she wants others to sacrifice (advertisers, golfers) for her cause — sacrifices she is not able or willing to make herself.
By the way, Ms. Burk’s article concerning abortion (pointed to from the page of the link in the post) misses the whole point in her poor attempt at satire. The suggestion that men’s bodies be controlled in regards to fertility is not the same as abortion. With abortion there is another life at stake. If you want to disagree with science on whether there is indeed another life involved, then so be it. But, the underlying argument isn’t just satirical, it’s not accurate. You still have to be accurate in your arguments, satire or not.
I bring up Ms. Burk’s editorial on abortion to show that she is all over the map when it comes to the issues she takes on. I think we all know the KKK is simply hideous and not much needs to be said about that.