>From SalonMag.COM
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Boys cause uproar in softball tournament
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By AMY FRANKLIN
Aug. 17, 2000 | KALAMAZOO, Mich. (AP) -- The Little League Softball World
Series is in an uproar this year because boys who joined a girls team are
playing in what has traditionally been an all-girls event.
Parents, teams and tournament officials say the five 16-year-old boys from
Arizona have an unfair physical advantage, and may even pose a danger to girls.
Some teams are threatening not to play the team, and the tournament director
himself is protesting.
"It looks like they stacked the deck. Those boys are huge," said Val
Maslauskas, a parent from a Massachusetts team whose players wore mouthguards
to protect themselves in a 10-2 loss to the Arizona team Wednesday. "We're
trying for equality for these girls and this is not equal."
The crowd erupted in cheers when one of the boys was thrown out at second base
and booed at a collision between an Arizona boy and a Westfield girl at first
base.
"They made catches in the outfield that no girl could have gotten to," said
Kelly Popko, who played third base for Westfield, Mass.
Little League Baseball Inc. made its softball and hardball divisions non-gender
specific in 1974 after losing lawsuits filed by boys demanding to play
softball, spokesman Lance Van Auken said Wednesday.
The first girl played in the Little League Baseball World Series in 1984. The
Arizona boys are the first to play in the softball series.
"Little League's preference is that the softball division be for girls," Van
Auken said. "It would be nice if there were a legal solution to it."
Richie Reyes and four other boys signed up for the girls team after their usual
summer baseball league disbanded. He doesn't see what the fuss is about and
says the girls' team needed more players.
"We were all brought up to believe that an athlete's an athlete," he said.
Four teams have indicated they won't play the team. A Philippines team had
originally threatened not to play, but players changed their minds and wound up
beating the boys-and-girls squad 3-2 Tuesday night.
Describing an "undercurrent of unhappiness," tournament director Bud Vanderberg
said he will take the issue to the national Little League board of directors
next week.
"I will do what's in my power to change this to make sure it's all girls
playing in this tournament," he said.
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A<>E<>R
Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960)
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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