Annals of Religiously-Justified Sexism

In Kansas (remember the state School Board opposing the teaching of evolution?) a basketball referee was not allowed to referee a high school boys game. Why not?

The game was at St. Mary’s Academy, a private religious school that sits on a sprawling campus about 25 miles northwest of Topeka. Before the game started, a school administrator approached Campbell’s officiating partner, Darin Putthoff of Topeka, and told him a woman could not serve as referee. That would be putting a woman in a position of authority over boys, he was told — a scenario that was contrary to beliefs at St. Mary’s Academy. “I was upset,” Putthoff said. “So I said, ‘You’re telling me you don’t have any teachers at the school who are women?’” When reached Tuesday by The Star, the athletic director at St. Mary’s declined to comment, and other officials referred questions to the school’s principal, Father Vicente A. Griego. Griego was at a retreat in Minnesota and unavailable for comment, they said. The school is owned and operated by the Society of St. Pius X, a group founded in 1970 in response to reforms that the Roman Catholic Church initiated with the Second Vatican Council. The group follows pre-Vatican II practices, such as the Latin Mass. Pope John Paul II excommunicated the society’s world leader, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, in the late 1980s. Lefebvre died in 1991. [...] According to the St. Mary’s Web site, “The ultimate goal of our schools is to form good Catholics and good citizens in such a manner that the whole person may be submitted to the reign of Jesus Christ in the spiritual, moral, intellectual, and physical spheres.”

For Fred Shockey, the message that came from the school that day was far different.

A basketball official who lives in Wamego, Kan., Shockey worked two games at St. Mary’s just before Campbell’s game. He was getting ready to leave when the school’s athletic director approached him and said there had been an emergency. The school needed Shockey to stay and referee another game. Reluctantly, Shockey agreed to do so — until he found out what the emergency was.

In a show of solidarity, Shockey and Putthoff walked off the court with Campbell.

I said, ‘There’s no way I’m staying,’” Shockey said. “I kept going, ‘Wow. Wow.’

“I was so disgusted.”

[...]

In 2004, St. Mary’s chose to forfeit its football game against White City High School because White City had a girl on its roster. At the time, an official in the U.S. district office for the Society of St. Pius X told The Star, “We’re trying to form the boys to be gentlemen, and knocking a girl around on a football field is the furthest thing from that. … It’s not a game for girls, and not a game for boys to play against girls.”

An official at the district office said Tuesday that, like Griego, all designated spokesmen were in Minnesota and unavailable for comment.

People who are too nutty for the official Catholic Church indoctrinating innnocent children who have no choice about where they're being sent to school. And it sounds like a boarding school. ("St. Mary’s, which houses students in kindergarten through 12th grade...") Wonder what the Society of St. Pius X has to say about priests & altar boys? "No comment," perhaps? "The boss is out of town on a retreat in Minnesota w/ some of his little friends?" "We have to teach boys to respect the authority of men?" "Jesus says shut your mouth (or open it, depending) and take it like a man?"