OPINION:
On Thursday, March 29, 2022, Oklahoma’s governor, Kevin Stitt, signed the “Save Women’s Sports Act into law.” He did so over the objection of many progressives who rushed to their keyboards to declare this law yet another example of conservative bigotry and cisgender injustice.
How is it possible that such disparate views exist? On one side of this debate, the governor of America’s “reddest of red states” says that “it’s important to protect women’s sports.” On the other side, we have a host of “Me-Too” activists who pretend to stand for “women’s rights,” shouting that Mr. Stitt’s protection of women’s rights isn’t right.
What in the world is going on here? Why is there such glaring disagreement over something that almost everyone would have assumed, up until about five seconds ago, was as uncontroversial as a woman’s right to have her own sport? Surely, we’re missing something, aren’t we?
Well, let’s look at the actual bill in question. As tedious as statutory language can be, maybe a quick overview will highlight who’s right and who’s wrong in this dispute. Here’s what the Oklahoma Senate Bill 2 actually says:
“This act shall be known and may be cited as the ‘Save Women’s Sports Act.’ As used in this section [the following definitions apply]: ‘School’ means a public school district or public charter school in this state or an institution within The Oklahoma State System of Higher Education.”
“‘School athletic association’ shall have the same meaning as provided for in Section 27-102 of Title 70 of the Oklahoma Statutes.” In other words, we’ve already defined this in previous law; go look it up.
“‘Intercollegiate association’ shall mean a national association that sets eligibility requirements for participation in sports at the collegiate level and that provides the coordination, supervision, and regulation of the intercollegiate competitions.”
The bill then goes on to specify the following:
“Athletic teams that are sponsored by a school or sponsored by a private school whose students or teams compete against a school shall be expressly designated as one of the following based on biological sex: 1. ‘Males,’ ‘men’ or ‘boys’; 2. ‘Females,’ ‘women’ or ‘girls’; or 3. ‘Coed’ or ‘mixed.’ Athletic teams designated for ‘females,’ ‘women,’ or ‘girls’ shall not be open to students of the male sex.”
And finally, the bill concludes:
“Any student who is deprived of an athletic opportunity or suffers any direct or indirect harm as a result of a violation of [this law] shall have a cause of action for injunctive relief, damages, and any other relief available and permitted by law against the school … [and] any student who is subject to retaliation or other adverse action by a school, school athletic association or intercollegiate association as a result of reporting a violation of [this law] shall have cause of action for injunctive relief, damages and any other relief available and permitted by law against the [school or organization in question].”
So, in other words, to put all this legalese into laymen’s language, the bill that Mr. Stitt just signed into law simply says schools are schools, colleges are colleges, teams are teams, sports are sports, men are men, and women are women. It then makes clear that any school, college, athletic association, athletic program, teacher, coach or administrator that deprives women of their incontrovertible right to their own sport, their own shower and their own locker room is breaking the law and that women, therefore, have the right to sue the socks off such people and organizations for their shameless and blatant misogyny.
Now ask yourself, who in their right mind would be against this bill?
When any culture comes to the point where it has a female Supreme Court nominee saying she cannot provide a definition of the word “woman” and where “women’s rights” activists proudly protest a law that codifies the biological fact of the female, you know you have a nation in intellectual and moral free fall and a country in the throes of imminent collapse.
Two thousand years ago, Jewish philosopher St. Paul warned of this as he stood in the streets of a crumbling Roman Empire: “They suppress the truth. … They are without excuse. … They [are] futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts [are] darkened. Claiming to be wise, they [are] fools. … Because they exchanged the truth for a lie and worshipped the created rather than the Creator, God gave them up to a debased mind.”
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery) and, most recently, “Grow Up: Life Isn’t Safe, But It’s Good.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.