This is Pastor Tim’s newspaper article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Monday, Feb 28, 2022
I am not a big sports fan, I know I have said this before. So do not mistake me as a big fan of college swim teams, but I have to admit that women’s college swimming has been forced into my attention over the past few months because of some apparent confusion.
Penn State’s Lia Thomas and Yale’s Iszac Henig have been winning a lot of swim meets and setting a lot of records for women’s swimming. Both of them were on the men’s team last season and have both come to the realization that they are really women. By switching over to the women’s team, they went from middle of the pack swimmers on the men’s team to setting records and taking all of the first-place accolades on the women’s team.
I can remember I was in college in the early 90s when Title IX was in hot debate. Title IX is a Civil Rights law that prohibits any discrimination between men and women. In principle, I agree with Title IX. There should be no discrimination between men and women. However, when this law is applied to sports, it means that for every men’s sport, there has to be an equal women’s sport. The controversy at that time was that men’s college sports were being cancelled because there was no corresponding women’s sport. Apparently, football was a more popular spectator sport than women’s volleyball. I am not taking a side on this issue; all you have to do is check the television schedule to see this is demonstrably true.
Now you can claim that football vs volleyball is apples to oranges in that they are two different sports, which is true. I ask you to check the TV schedule in a week or two when March Madness starts and see which brackets are getting the most attention. We can all hate it and claim it is wrong and unfair, but the bottom line is, men’s college sports bring in more revenue than women’s do.
Back to NCAA women’s swim teams. How can it be fair if biological men are taking over women’s sports? What is the point of Title IX when men are winning both the men’s and women’s swim meets? This is unfair to the women who are working hard just to win second place to men.
Feminists worked for decades to provide opportunities for women in our world, and we are all better off to recognize the strength and contributions of women. It is beautiful and wonderful how many opportunities are available to women today that were not available to my grandmother. I have worked with countless powerful and intelligent women, both personally and professionally, and I have appreciated them all. The only men who are intimidated by women and need to hold them back are the men who know they can not keep up. I feel sorry for these men.
For the women of today to be cheated out of goals they worked very hard to accomplish by men who have decided God made an error in their creation is unfair. There is no other instance where I would get to switch categories based on my own decision. I have a credential to be a United Methodist Pastor. If I walked across the street to Miller Funeral Home and declared myself to be a funeral director, that would be a problem with legal ramifications because I lack the required credentials. To make a sudden conversion from United Methodist Pastor to funeral director would compromise what it means to be a funeral director, and it would undermine what I have always claimed about being a pastor. I simply have no right to make the claim because of the credentials I lack no matter how I may feel about it.
How much more true is this when it comes to competition on the athletic field? To get to choose between the men’s and women’s teams based on your own identification with no objective evidence compromises one side and undermines the other.