Professional golfer Fred Couples became embroiled in controversy in August after it was revealed that he is helping to design a golf course for the Southern Dunes Golf Course near Maricopa, Arizona. The club, intended for avid low-handicap golfers, will be men-only.
The club will be completely member-owned; once all of the 500 or so memberships are sold, the members literally own the club. Because this makes the golf club completely private and not open to the general public, this means that any sexual discrimination lawsuit against the club would have a huge mountain to climb.
Kathleen Ferraro, director of the women’s studies program at Arizona State University, told the Associated press, “I find it rather shocking that there are still such bastions of intolerance.”
But Brian Curley, a partner in the firm designing the club, points out, there are plenty of women’s only athletic clubs which no one ever accuses of being “bastions of intolerance.” Surely if there is nothing wrong for women to desire to join athletic clubs that only admit other women as members, it is a bit hard to understand what the problem would be with a men’s only private athletic club.
Source:
Couples helping to design men-only course. The Associated Press, August 23, 2001.