Day: March 7, 2003

Half a Cheer for St. Bonaventure’s Basketball Team

After the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team decided not to play its final two games of the season it has been excoriated in the sport’s press and the Atlantic 10 is talking about whether or not to drop the team from its league. But in the face of the absurdity that is the NCAA, is what St. Bonaventure’s team decided to do all that bizarre?

The team’s problems started with when junior college transfer Jamil Terrell joined the St. Bonaventure team last April. Terrell was ineligible and St. Bonaventure’s compliance officer warned the basketball coach at the time, but the coach went to the university president who overruled the compliance officer and allowed Terrell to join the team.

He played in 25 games and when the Atlantic-10 athletic directors finally declared him ineligible a few weeks ago, they forced St. Bonaventure to not only forfeit 6 of their games, but banned the team from the Atlantic-10 postseason tournament. The team said thanks, but no thanks, and decided not to play its final two games.

This brought outrage from commentators whining about the team being quitters who disgraced their sport and league. Give me a break — NCAA men’s basketball has so disgraced itself at the coaching and administrative level, that it’s hard to believe St. Bonaventure’s basketball team created even a ripple.

This is an organization, after all, where Bobby Knight can be caught on tape choking a player during practice, and he is free to coach at any school that will have him. Terrell gets a welding certificate rather than an actual degree, however, and the Atlantic-10 issues it the basketball equivalent of the death penalty. Coaches like Jerry Tarkanian can violation hop from one university to another leaving ineligible players in their wake while raking in the financial rewards for themselves.

This is an industry in which the median salary for men’s NCAA basketball coaches is $290,000 but everyone freaks out when some kid wants a booster to cover his $300 phone bill.

The only academic mission the NCAA has left is serving up a hefty portion of Hypocrisy 101.

No Sex for Oil?

One of the nuttier ideas for opposing war in Iraq comes from a feminist-inspired group called The Lysistrata Project, inspired by the famous play by Aristophanes. The Danish-based group is planning a reading of Lysistrata in 56 countries, and also is seriously urging women not to have sex with men who favor war in Iraq.

Danish actress Anne-Marie Helger told the BBC News Online that, “Mrs. Blair, Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Rasmusen should stay out of their husbands’ beds until they call their dogs off.”

The BBC quotes Rhea Leman, an American theater director working in Copenhagen, as saying, “Basically we are saying No Peace, No Sex.”

Blogger Asparagirl has the perfect response to such nonsense,

The project of course assumes that all women are anti-war and all men are pro-war, and that furthermore the only way for women to make their political opinions known is to withhold sex, and further still that any woman would actually want to do that. It also implies that the best way that today’s women have of influencing their worlds is not through their writings, speeches, jobs, money or votes, but through their ability to have or not have sex, and that the sex will be solely with men, who are of course the real powerhouses in our society when it comes to shaping world events.

Sources:

Real women don’t wage war? Asparagirl.Com, March 2, 2003.

Sex boycott urged over war. The BBC, March 3, 2003.

Killing Women: Two for the Price of One in Iran

New Zealand News recently ran a chilling story about how the Iranian legal system devalues the lives of women. The story centered around Tehran-based human rights lawyer Hadjimashhady whose daughter was killed in a car accident in 2002 after a 70-year-old opium addicted truck driver fell asleep and ran a stop sign.

Under Iranian law, Hadjimashhady was entitled to blood money from the family of the driver, but because the victim was a woman, he was only entitled to half the blood money that would have been required had the victim been a man.

Hadjimashhady told The New Zealand Times that he wasn’t interested in the blood money, and that the differing rates for men and women make the whole affair even more bizarre,

I don’t want the dieh [blood money]. Janooreh [the truck driver] doesn’t have any money, he wasn’t insured, and he doesn’t have any family. But this law, this is a reactionary law. It is something that belongs in medieval times, I think.

A group of female Members of Parliament in Iran are campaigning to equalize the monetary amounts. They note that while the system may have made sense in a traditional, nonindustrial society — where the death of a man could mean the death of the primary income provider in the family — that it is insulting to women in contemporary Iran.

Fatemeh Rakei of the Iranian Parliament’s Committee for Women’s Issues also cites a similar religious tradition called quessas, in which if a woman murders a man the mans’ family can demand vengeance (i.e., the death of the woman), but if a man kills a woman, the woman’s family must first pay the man’s family half of the man’s blood money before demanding vengeance.

Rakei told The New Zealand News that she believes this has led to an increase in wife killing since many families simply can’t afford to pay the blood money.

Source:

The price of women. Tim Elliott, The New Zealand News, February 15, 2003.

Free Clara Harris?

A Texas jury earlier this year convicted Clara Harris of killing her husband after she caught him with another woman. Harris repeatedly drove over her husband with her car.

In a short article about the trial and conviction, Cathy Young noted that during a segment about the case on The O’Reilly Factor some women wrote in via e-mail to express their support for Harris. But, to my knowledge, no prominent feminists took the absurd route of defending Harris.

Not so, however, for those nutty right wingers at WorldNetDaily.Com where Editor and CEO Joseph Farah devoted an entire column to singing Harris’ praise and saying that, if there were any justice in the world, Harris would be set free. Farah wrote,

I say: Free Clara Harris. We need more women like her. Live like her.

. . .

People are no longer accountable to anyone. They don’t believe they are accountable to God. They don’t believe they are accountable to their spouses. And they don’t believe they are accountable to their children. They are not accountable to the state, as no-fault divorce laws have made certain.

. . .

If I were on that jury, I would find Clara Harris not guilty. After she was sprung, I’d give her a medal. She did the world a favor. She may have acted emotionally. She may be sorry for what she has done. But, frankly, she did the right thing. That creep deserved what he got.

In Harris’ case, fortunately, no one on the jury shared Farah’s views, but Young notes a Texas case where the jury did buy into this sort of ridiculous argument. In 1999 a jury convicted Jimmy Dean Watkins of murder after he shot and killed his estranged wife in front of his 10-year old son. But the jury sentenced him to just 10 years of parole after buying into his claim that he was acting on a sudden passion (even though Watkins had fled the scene after his gun jammed, then returned to fire the fatal shot after restoring his weapon to working condition).

Apparently a world in which men and women run around killing their philandering spouses without any sort of consequence may appeal to Farah, but Young is correct in noting that as much as we might sympathize with someone who commits a crime of passion, we should never allow that sympathy to be used as a justification for murder,

A certain measure of sympathy for people who commit crimes of passion is understandable. Many feminists have attributed this sympathy to the underlying belief that men “own” women; but they are wrong. Most of us can relate to feelings of anger, loss and betrayal caused by infidelity or rejection?in a way we cannot relate to the cold-blooded motives of someone who kills for greed. But we should never allow this emotional understanding to overshadow the horror of what happened to the victims.

Sources:

Free Clara Harris! Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily.Com, January 30, 2003.

She Done Him Wrong: Cowboy law, sexism mix in wronged wife’s trial. Cathy Young, Reason, February 4, 2003.