Assembly: The Forgotten Freedom

he Women’s National Basketball Association has recently brought a lot of absurd troubles on itself because its own leaders are unable or unwilling to state the obvious truth: that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and that not all the pretending in the world can alter the fact, even with hormone-pumping and mutilation and pinning the tail on the donkey. To shine a floodlight on the absurdity, a couple of male basketball players, over the hill in age, have submitted their names for the next season’s draft, insisting that they are women. Of course it is all nonsense. I am a man, and my insistence can no more make me a woman than it can make me Napoleon or a golden retriever or an alien from the Andromeda galaxy.

The Women’s National Basketball Association is by definition for women. I’ve watched many clips from their games, and to my eye the players are earth-bound and awkward, and they would have a hard time keeping up with the taller, quicker, and stronger boys of a good high school team, especially as they would be required to use the full-size basketball. That may be reflected in the fact that the league has always run in the red, with the shortfall made up by the National Basketball Association—the NBA, which any woman may play for but cannot because men are men and women are women. Nancy Lieberman, perhaps the greatest woman basketball player ever, did play a little bit in the old United States Basketball League (USBL), averaging 1.7 points and 11 minutes per game. To say that the USBL was a “minor league” is to say too much, as it was not a launching pad for careers in the NBA. That is what college basketball is.

It was instead a landing pad for players who were no longer good enough to stay in the NBA.

The WNBA loses about $50 million a year, which the NBA pays for. Why they do so, I don’t know. Perhaps they believe that putting basketball in any form before the eyes of the public is good advertising for their league. Perhaps the owners, the coaches, and the players believe it is the right thing to do. That is their business, not mine. “It’s a free country,” as people used to say.

The WNBA must be kept for women, not for men, because otherwise there would be no such league at all. That is plain biology and physics. What’s not plain biology and physics is that there are leagues, tournaments, and championships in chess that are open to girls and women, but not to boys and men. Hou Yifan, regarded as second only to Judit Polgar, the greatest woman chess player ever, is at the moment ranked No. 114 in the world, having recently slipped out of the top 100. She is permitted to play against the men, but the men are not permitted to invade the women’s tournaments. This also is not my business. “It’s a free country,” and it ought to be a free world. Let the people in charge of chess tournaments arrange them as they see fit.

The freedom here is that of assembly. It is a fundamental freedom, not to be limited to narrowly political action. Because man is a social creature, he gathers with his fellows to work, to play, to talk, to debate, to build, to exchange goods—rightly so, if they keep within the law. What rules they establish for membership are their business, not mine or anybody else’s. I understand here that we Americans are still paying for the wickedness and stupidity of racism. “We don’t serve colored people,” said an embarrassed young waiter to Vic Power, the Puerto Rican first baseman (1954–1965) and All-Star for the Kansas City Athletics and the Cleveland Indians. “That’s all right,” Power assured the man, “I don’t eat colored people.” Did that happen in the deep South? No—in Syracuse, New York. So the idea is now ingrained in us that if we permit people to exercise freedom of assembly in a broad sense, we may end up again with businesses like that restaurant in Syracuse. ...

Excellent wordsmithing, and worth reading in full at the jump.

Moreover, I think we can draw legal distinctions between a public business and a private organization and moral distinctions among various rules for membership. Rules that exclude on the basis of race are not the same as rules that allow for men-only or women-only clubs or for fraternal or sororal societies. Men and women sometimes want to associate with members of their own sex, and there is nothing wrong with that; it is, in itself, a healthy expression of our sexual being. So also there is nothing immoral or obnoxious about rules that require that you live in a certain area, or that you descend from one of the passengers on the Mayflower, or that you went to a certain school, or that you are engaged in a certain line of work, or whatever. Nor should such groups be dragged into court to justify what they choose. “We enjoy it as it is,” their leaders should say. “It’s a free country.” ...

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