![](\"https:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_0DySLTT4PWo\/R9PjVh9YdjI\/AAAAAAAACGw\/66P2HywHPjM\/s320\/89_basketball_NBA_free_sports_computerdesktop_wallpaper_l.jpg\")
<\/a>It\u2019s easy to dismiss what happened in Kansas recently between a private religious high school and a female referee as misogynistic. When Michelle Campbell showed up to officiate a boys\u2019 basketball game at St. Mary\u2019s Academy, she was told the school did not allow women to referee boys\u2019 games. Campbell did not officiate the game nor did her male counterpart, who refused to work the game out of loyalty to Campbell.<\/p>\nInitial reports stated that the school, citing religious beliefs, did not allow women to have authority over men, and therefore could not permit a woman to referee boys. School officials aren\u2019t speaking publicly on the matter, but St. Mary\u2019s headmaster Rev. Fr. Vincent A. Griego did release a statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis alleged reason was neither stated nor is it held by any official of St. Mary\u2019s Academy,\u201d Griego wrote. He went on to write that: \u201cThe Church has always promoted the ideal of forming and educating boys and girls separately during the adolescent years, especially in physical education. . . . In addition, our school aims to instill in our boys the proper respect for women and girls. Teaching our boys to treat ladies with deference, we cannot place them in an aggressive athletic competition where they are forced to play inhibited by their concern about running into a female referee.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Kansas State High School Activities Association is looking into the Feb. 2 incident and will hold a hearing on March 11. St. Mary\u2019s Academy, a private religious school located about 25 miles northwest of Topeka, is not a member of the state high school association. It is unclear whether any action by the high school association will affect the school.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s a gender issue hiding behind a religious issue,\u201d said Marjorie Snyder, co-CEO of the Women\u2019s Sports Foundation. \u201cI think [these type of incidents are] often unspoken. It\u2019s never verbalized as being a gender issues. It could be verbalized as being a seniority issue or an experience issue or a skill level issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Joe Marosy, the commissioner for the District of Columbia basketball officials association, assigns referees to work high school games in and around Washington. He said there are 16 women among the 400 referees officiating basketball games in his area. Marosy has never had a school refuse to allow a woman to work a boys\u2019 game.<\/p>\n
Women \u201creferee boys\u2019 games,\u201d Marosy said. \u201cA couple of them are in the top 10 of my referees.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is not the first time gender and religious beliefs have clashed at St. Mary\u2019s. According to a report in the Kansas City Star, St. Mary\u2019s chose to forfeit a football game in 2004 rather than play an opponent with a girl on its roster. A school official told the paper at the time: \u201cWe\u2019re trying to form the boys to be gentlemen, and knocking a girl around on a football field is the furthest thing from that. . . . It\u2019s not a game for girls, and not a game for boys to play against girls.\u201d<\/p>\n
St. Mary\u2019s Academy is affiliated with Society of St. Pius X, a Catholic traditionalist group formed in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. William D. Dinges, who has been a professor of religious studies at Catholic University for more than 20 years, spent time at St. Mary\u2019s while writing his doctoral dissertation on the traditionalist phenomena.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the Vatican II and the changes that took place, there were some Catholics who were very disgruntled by this,\u201d Dinges said. \u201cAnd much of this discontent eventually came to galvanize around the traditionalists groups. One of the most visible of these is the Society of St. Pius X. . . . Archbishop Lefebvre was a French archbishop, very, very conservative. Somebody who himself had some very serious problems with some of the changes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lefebvre, who died in 1991, formed a priestly fraternity, training them in the Latin Tridentine Mass, even though that liturgy had been prohibited since 1971. His followers came to the United States, first to New York and Texas then to Kansas in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and set up wildcat parishes.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t have to be a fundamentalist to recognize that our culture has gone through and is going through some very radical redefining of what we mean by family, gender dynamics, femininity, masculinity and so forth,\u201d Dinges said. \u201cThose concepts have become much more unstable or fluid or deconstructed. What you have here [at St. Mary\u2019s] is an example of a people who in a sense are trying to assert a more framed order of things, a sense of definite boundaries. . . . To the degree that the identity of women becomes unstable or more diffused, this necessarily at some deeper psychological level threatens in a sense religion itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dinges, the father of three daughters, doesn\u2019t approve of the thinking of the Society of St. Pius X, but he does understand its origins.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis idea of the kind of gender specific responsibility of males to protect females and to the degree that a woman on a basketball court makes that more complicated, that makes sense,\u201d Dinges said. \u201cI mean, it makes sense not in the sense that I agree with it, but if you accept certain premises, it does.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There’s much more about this controversy, and some interesting reader comments, at the link<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What on earth does basketball have to do with Marcel Lefebvre? When it comes to a recent controversy in Kansas, a lot. The item below is from the Washington Post’s On Faith section: It\u2019s easy to dismiss what happened in Kansas recently between a private religious high school and a female referee as misogynistic. When…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":365,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ripped-from-the-headlines"],"yoast_head":"\n
Foul ball? - The Deacon's Bench<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Foul ball? - The Deacon's Bench\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What on earth does basketball have to do with Marcel Lefebvre? When it comes to a recent controversy in Kansas, a lot. The item below is from the Washington Post’s On Faith section: It\u2019s easy to dismiss what happened in Kansas recently between a private religious high school and a female referee as misogynistic. When…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Deacon's Bench\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2008-03-09T09:09:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_0DySLTT4PWo\/R9PjVh9YdjI\/AAAAAAAACGw\/66P2HywHPjM\/s320\/89_basketball_NBA_free_sports_computerdesktop_wallpaper_l.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"deacon greg kandra\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Foul ball? - The Deacon's Bench","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Foul ball? - The Deacon's Bench","og_description":"What on earth does basketball have to do with Marcel Lefebvre? When it comes to a recent controversy in Kansas, a lot. The item below is from the Washington Post’s On Faith section: It\u2019s easy to dismiss what happened in Kansas recently between a private religious high school and a female referee as misogynistic. When…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html","og_site_name":"The Deacon's Bench","article_published_time":"2008-03-09T09:09:00+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_0DySLTT4PWo\/R9PjVh9YdjI\/AAAAAAAACGw\/66P2HywHPjM\/s320\/89_basketball_NBA_free_sports_computerdesktop_wallpaper_l.jpg"}],"author":"deacon greg kandra","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html","name":"Foul ball? - The Deacon's Bench","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_0DySLTT4PWo\/R9PjVh9YdjI\/AAAAAAAACGw\/66P2HywHPjM\/s320\/89_basketball_NBA_free_sports_computerdesktop_wallpaper_l.jpg","datePublished":"2008-03-09T09:09:00+00:00","dateModified":"2008-03-09T09:09:00+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/#\/schema\/person\/052b8cd86cc713feaccdc8282b03cf10"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html#primaryimage","url":"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_0DySLTT4PWo\/R9PjVh9YdjI\/AAAAAAAACGw\/66P2HywHPjM\/s320\/89_basketball_NBA_free_sports_computerdesktop_wallpaper_l.jpg","contentUrl":"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_0DySLTT4PWo\/R9PjVh9YdjI\/AAAAAAAACGw\/66P2HywHPjM\/s320\/89_basketball_NBA_free_sports_computerdesktop_wallpaper_l.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/03\/foul-ball.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Foul ball?"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/","name":"The Deacon's Bench","description":"Where a Roman Catholic Deacon Ponders the World","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/#\/schema\/person\/052b8cd86cc713feaccdc8282b03cf10","name":"deacon greg kandra","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/a4e\/a4e07ce6fde3f10d4d9753243fd48d45x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/a4e\/a4e07ce6fde3f10d4d9753243fd48d45x96.jpg","caption":"deacon greg kandra"},"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/author\/deacon-greg-kandra"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/365"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}