Grab a Kleenex and shed a tear for the poor, old misunderstood Kiwanis club.
A federal judge ruled last week that Kiwanis International can`t stop one of its New Jersey chapters from admitting a woman. How awful! What`s the world coming to if a bunch of good-hearted guys can`t get together without dames?
Whatever happened to the First Amendment and freedom to associate with only the people you want to?
The trouble started when the Ridgewood, N.J., Kiwanis chapter tried to increase its membership by taking in art consultant Julie Fletcher. Obviously, Kiwanis International had to kick her out. The 350,000 Kiwanis members worldwide have made it quite clear time after time they don`t want to let women in. They never have. Just last summer, they voted women out one more time at their convention in Canada.
It`s not that the Kiwanians are prejudiced or sexist or anything like that. They`re all a great bunch of guys who do a lot of good stuff for their communities. But they want to get together as guys. They like gals all right
–but they just don`t think they belong in a guys` club. A lot of them have wives who don`t want their husbands hanging around in meetings with other women. What kind of a gal would want to go where she`s not wanted, anyway?
Besides, Kiwanis is an international organization: 8,200 clubs in 75 countries. Even if Americans got big-hearted and let gals into chapters here, the guys overseas would pull out. It would bust up the whole deal.
So naturally, when those radical troublemakers in Ridgewood refused to get rid of Fletcher, headquarters had to act. The honchos didn`t want a big sexist flap, like the Jaycees stumbled into. So they sued the Ridgewood chapter for trademark infringement, saying it couldn`t use the Kiwanis name and logo if its members didn`t act like real Kiwanis guys.
Fletcher sued back, saying, of all things, that her civil rights were being violated. Shows what kind of a broad she is.
But U.S. District Judge H. Lee Sarokin took Fletcher`s side–against 275,000 American Kiwanians, all good, backbone-of-the-community-types who believe in the Constitution and stand up for American values.
The judge rattled on for 39 pages, saying legal stuff like, sure, people have a right to associate freely–but women have a right not to be excluded because they are gals, if that makes any sense.
Sarokin had the gall to say, ”To permit women to become members of Kiwanis harms no one; to prohibit women from becoming members harms us all.” Cute! You`d think he was running for something.
It gets worse. ”The Kiwanis name will not suffer by (women`s) inclusion; indeed it probably suffers more from their exclusion,” he wrote. ”The time has come, at least in New Jersey, for Kiwanis to permit women to do more than make pancakes.”
Sarokin even said, ”A membership sign of `Men Only` can be as offensive and repugnant as the sign `Whites Only.` ” That just shows he doesn`t understand. The Kiwanians aren`t prejudiced! Just ask any one of them.
Fortunately, the ruling only holds for the 162 Kiwanis chapters in New Jersey. Maybe the Supreme Court will reverse this crazy decision. But now that there`s a broad on that court, who knows.
And it`s not just the Kiwanians who feel this way. Last week, 433 delegates to a policymaking council of Rotary International rejected women as members by voice vote. Like the Kiwanians, Rotarians aren`t sexist or prejudiced, of course. They are just deferring to more conservative members in other countries, their spokesman explained.
Members ”quite simply like the notion of having, in a traditional sense, a men`s club, while not being antifeminist,” the spokesman said. What could be clearer than that?
