Caitlin Clark, Equal Pay, and Discrimination

And other things that give people a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

Have you ever tried to divorce yourself from an opinion you’re emotionally invested in, despite knowing, when you’re honest with yourself, that you’re logically very wrong?

It can be challenging. You try and ignore the overhanging feeling that you’re a hypocrite, that you may say things like “I believe the Bible is the word of God,” despite knowing that it’s mostly incoherent regurgitated gibberish.

Sometimes you just really want something to be true.

Yeah, your husband is a great man and a caring father. It just so happens he was arrested for exposing himself to teenagers in the bowling alley once.

Both things certainly can’t be accurate.

I get the feeling a lot of people have this conundrum when it comes to women’s sports.

They really want to think that women are equal to men in this pursuit, saying things like “Serena Williams is the best tennis player of all time, men and women!”

That’s a curious statement, since she only competes against women.

I personally struggle with the topic, because from an emotional perspective I feel as though women should be able to have their own divisions in sports.

It’s not harming anyone and it’s good for the youth.

Yet my logical response to most of the conversations surrounding ‘equality in sports’ is that women should be grateful that society has permitted them to discriminate based on gender, that this is a foregone entitlement they should enjoy, and it should go unquestioned under penalty of being called a misogynist or worse.

You won. You have your own medals and trophies. You should probably leave it at that before people really start questioning what’s going on.

Discrimination, based on gender, is illegal in the United States.

Hence, anyone, man or woman, can play in the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, The PGA Tour, the ATP tennis tour, the National Football League, or any other professional sports league which doesn’t segregate based on gender.

That is provided they are good enough to compete.

There is no Men’s National Basketball Association. It’s just the National Basketball Association. It’s a meritocracy. It’s not discriminatory.

The WNBA is discriminatory in that only women are permitted to play. Men are not allowed. The same goes for the WPGA Tour, etc.

It is required that you be a woman. Men, and nobody else, are excluded. That is discrimination.

Legally speaking, under Title VII, which states that people are “protected against discrimination… regardless of gender or sex,” the WNBA is in violation of federal law, not to mention state and county ordinances, etc.

I understand many people reading this will insist that I’m misinterpreting and don’t understand this law, because, their reasoning goes, “If women didn’t have their own leagues, none of them would be able to play, because they couldn’t make the team.”

Exactly. That’s the entire point of sports. The best athletes make the team.

Would it be considered acceptable to have an Asian football league or a whites only rowing team? (They’ve already done that. It wasn’t okay.)

I truly believe eliminating gender discrimination in sports leagues and embracing a CoEd system would be a welcome wake-up call to the country at large.

It would force people to think in terms of who’s best for the job without getting bogged down in demographics.

It would also end all of this nonstop chatter regarding what to do about transsexual athletes infiltrating women’s sports: If you’re good enough, you’re on the team. Everyone is welcome. Problem solved. Move on to something worthwhile now.

Of course, due to the emotional perspective of most readers, they’re going to push back on this theory, even though they have that overhanging feeling that, logically speaking, they’re wrong.

Women’s sports is embracing the concept of Separate but Equal. We did away with that a long time ago. It doesn’t work.

On a separate note, sometimes it takes me longer than usual to recognize something pretty obvious.

I recently spent about a week wondering why right-wing people are very obviously more fond of memes than their left-wing counterparts.

As you have surely noticed, Trump supporters simply delight in memes. They love them.

Any image juxtaposing some combination of a Nazi frog, a machine gun, a character from The Office, a swastika, the Twin Towers, a Karen, Joe Biden, Donald Trump looking solemn, a Furry, a pissed off feminist, someone crying, a guy lifting weights, Kid Rock, or a single mother, right-wing people will find this humorous or edgy, and they’ll be thrilled enough to re-post it on their accounts.

I wondered why this is the case.

Maybe there was a certain crossover between social media platforms.

Certainly, old people, who tend to skew more conservative, are more likely to use Facebook at this point.

And younger, alt-right types are more inclined to Twitter and more niche platforms like 4Chan and, gulp, Truth Social, which are also based more on re-posting than sharing original content.

Instagram, the most popular social media platform, doesn’t encourage public re-posting, while these other, less successful platforms still do.

So, I thought, what we are seeing is a sampling of old, set-in-their-ways (i.e. xenophobic) conservatives, and pre-teens and other young people who are just discovering their political identities, and who happen to favor platforms where sharing of memes is still pretty common.

Then I thought that maybe this is not a coincidence, because what the very old and twelve-year-old boys have in common is that nobody gives a shit about their opinions, so they feel the need to scream them into a void.

Then I realized, oh, man, I was missing the obvious.

The reason Trump supporters love memes is that memes typically contain between two and ten words and take a hard stance on a complex issue without requiring any attempt to gain information.

In other words, they are a carbon-copied, easily acquired substitute for actually being informed or having a thought-out opinion on the subject.

Trump supporters are much less able or willing to read, was the obvious conclusion.

Not sure how I missed it, but what’s their excuse?