Cheerleading is Not a Sport

Gee, ya think?

A judge has confirmed what most people already know. Cheerleading is all fine and good, but — a sport??? Therefore, a university cannot point to its cheerleading team and say “Why no, we don’t discriminate against women’s sports. See those cheerleaders over there?”

Title IX requires all universities to provide equal opportunities for men and women in school athletics. Quinnipiac University tried to make an end run around Title IX by eliminating the women’s varsity volleyball team and replacing it with a competitive cheerleading squad.

The Connecticut ACLU’s executive director said this decision “gives force to the law that has opened doors for women over the last 30 years.”

As one of the comments at the end of the linked article says, this is like Reagan saying ketchup and relish are vegetables, so school lunch programs don’t need to provide any additional nutrition.

My favorite example of this kind of “reasoning” was back in the ‘80s. In California, a regional agency was trying to get all cities to provide a certain amount of low-income housing. The wealthy-beyond-wealthy (and more sterile than an operating room) town of Tiburon told this agency that they were already complying with this, because affluent residents’ servants’ quarters qualified as low-income housing.