FIRST-PERSON: Wrestling girls
by Tim Ellsworth
JACKSON, Tenn. (BP)–A Washington man is upset because some wrestlers at private schools won’t wrestle the girls on his daughter’s team. The boys are choosing to forfeit their matches rather than wrestle a girl.
According to the Seattle Times, Jerry Connors is preparing for a court battle. His daughter Meaghan is a seventh-grader and is on her middle school’s wrestling team. At some of the team’s matches, opponents are refusing to wrestle her or one of her teammates, Sylvie Shiosaki, because it makes them uncomfortable.
Who can blame them? The reason they’re refusing to wrestle with girls is because they have a moral problem with it. Don Johnson, the superintendent at Cascade Christian School, said in the Seattle Times story that the school “does not want to put our young men in a situation where they would be inappropriately touching a young lady.”
But that doesn’t satisfy Connors, who is going the legal route because he thinks his daughter is the victim of a form of sex discrimination. He wants the league to force opposing wrestlers to step onto the mat regardless of the opponent. He obviously doesn’t have a problem with offending the moral and religious beliefs of teenage boys or their parents.
There are so many things wrong about this it’s difficult to know where to start.
First off, however, is the suspect wisdom of parents allowing their teenage daughter to wrestle on a boys’ team to begin with. The Seattle Times story says for Meaghan Connors and Sylvie Shiosaki the sport of wrestling is challenging and is in no way sexual.
“When you walk on the mat, you’re not a girl, you’re not a guy anymore,” Shiosaki said in the story. “You’re just there to wrestle.”
For the girls, that’s most likely the truth. For teenage boys, however, it’s not that innocent. For some, it’s a chance for cheap thrills and groping with impunity, a chance to do something that would get them slapped, arrested or expelled in any other setting.
And Mr. Connors is not just allowing it to happen. He’s encouraging it.
This is also another case of a sue-happy individual clogging up the courts with a case that’s simply not that big of a deal. It would be different if this girl didn’t want to wrestle with boys and the school made her do it. Yes, that certainly would be a violation of her rights, and her dad ought to do something about it.
Connors claims that his daughter’s rights are being violated. “My daughter’s rights are not going to be bargained away for any reason,” he said.
The opportunity to compete on a wrestling team is a privilege, not a right ““- unless, of course, “freedom to wrestle” is hidden somewhere in a version of the Constitution nobody’s read.
The funny thing is that his daughter Meaghan didn’t win any matches by forfeit this year. It was Shiosaki who got the forfeits. According to the Seattle Times, Meaghan “came home upset when Shiosaki got forfeits. She told her father she felt degraded, like an ‘object of lust.'”
Let’s see, boys refuse to put their hands all over her body, and that makes her feel like an object of lust? One guess who put that idea into her head. It’s hard to imagine she came up with that all by herself.
The courts should take one look at this nonsense and toss it out with haste. And instead of escalating this conflict, Connors should be thanking these young men for treating his daughter with the respect she deserves.
Tim Ellsworth writes this column from his home in Jackson, Tenn. Write to him at [email protected].
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