For golfers, the Masters at Augusta, Ga., played the first full week of April, is Spring’s inaugural rite. The most prestigious tournament on the planet, it may be the one thing we can watch on television without being insulted and assaulted by all things modern.
And last year, that woman tried to ruin it.
Martha Burk, a dyspeptic feminist, wanted to join the men’s club. Her courtship unrequited, she vowed to fight. The New York Times, led by disgraced editor Howell Raines, took her side, and in the months running up to April, ran a relentless campaign to force the club to admit women. Augusta National Chairman Hootie Johnson remained implacable. No way, no how, said he. So the media then tried to enlist Tiger Woods in their cockamamie crusade. Wisely, he declined.
The club, he said, is private property. No one has a “right” to join it or play there. Augusta’s real rights supersede Burk’s imaginary civil rights. Johnson stood fast, and thus did Burk’s silly campaign end. Organized womanhood’s compradoress was reduced to sloshing around in the rain outside Augusta National’s gates, twittering the usual feminist amphigory.
Rights, but not Burk’s, were the nexus of the debate.
Men vs. Women
On one level, the Burk brouhaha was sociological; the question was whether a men’s club can exclude women. At the time, I remarked that “civil-rights” ideology wasn’t the only thing driving Burk’s jihad against Augusta.
She simply couldn’t stand something being discussed or done at Augusta to which she was not privy. The idea that men were lolling about the club, eating sandwiches with dill pickles and ruffled chips and drinking beer, while excluding the fairer sex, sent Burk into conniption fits. Good.
Nothing is wrong with Augusta’s excluding women, for the same reason that nothing is wrong with little boys tacking up a sign on the tree house that says, “No Girls!,” or with men gathering for poker night, sans women. Sometimes, men don’t want women around. And not because they believe women are inferior.
To put it bluntly, it was about time the feminists heard an unfamiliar word: “No.”
Private Property
But something equally important was at stake.
Burk, Raines and the other girls might not know it, but Augusta National is private property. Members pay dues to Augusta, not to Burk or The New York Times.
The left-wing notion that Burk has a “right” to join Augusta is rooted in a legal theory called “public accommodation.” It means that some private property is “public” because it provides a “public service.” This is the legal cudgel the homosexuals used to batter the Boy Scouts. Hotels, restaurants and other businesses are also “public accommodations,” akin, presumably, to municipal pay toilets. They can’t turn anyone away.
Yet If private property is a “public accommodation,” and the owner cannot decide who enters or uses it, then the property isn’t private. The owner has no rights. Ultimately, the government, through courts and laws, controls his property, and therefore, his livelihood.
Thank Burk
Control, of course, was the point. Most infuriating to Burk and Raines must have been Johnson’s stony rebuff. Someone finally said, “No.”
A woman, he said, will not join Augusta until the club wants one, and never “at the point of a bayonet.” When Burk and her fellow travelers pulled the big bayonet, threatening the Masters’ television advertisers, Johnson disarmed them. He yanked the advertising. The Masters can run for eternity without it.
Perhaps we should thank Burk. The Masters’ advertising was never as obtrusive as that on typical sporting events, including golf’s other majors, but the ad-free Masters still is a gift from the golf gods. Television fans loved it.
Augusta triumphed. And so did the Masters.
April 5, 2004
Syndicated columnist R. Cort Kirkwood [send him mail] is an occasional columnist for LewRockwell.com. His book, Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans To Know And Admire, is to be published next spring.
