"Because she's a girl"

While we still have much to do to recognize the extent of gender-based discrimination in this country, you’d think that we would have at least moved past this. Inevitably, a major part of the discourse surrounding this case will be the difference between “public” institutions and “private” institutions. Even many folks who disagree with kicking this girl off the football team will concede that, as a private institution, the school has the right to do as it wishes. That was part of the debate over lack of female membership at Augusta National Golf Club a few years ago, it was part of how Lou Dobbs framed discussion of English-only policies that I wrote about last week, and it plays a significant role in many other cases that involve discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, nation of origin, etc. I have thought for some time that we may need to rethink the ways that the United States conceptualizes public and private, including both our cultural conceptualizations and our legal conceptualizations of this split. This instance just reconfirms that thought.