(COMMERCIAL BREAK) CARLSON: Welcome back to CROSSFIRE. In a world full of troubles, disease, and possible war, it's hard to find a more irrelevant cause than pushy women who want to join a private club in an unremarkable southern town. But that's Jesse Jackson's latest cause anyway. He's here in the CROSSFIRE from Chicago.
BEGALA: Reverend, what should those who agree with you, that think Augusta National ought to integrate women, what are we supposed to do? Boycott CBS? I'm happy to do that, but...
JACKSON: I think that some people say that 1947, where all the issues that blacks had to deal with, fight for a black guy to play baseball, it's similar baseball (UNINTELLIGIBLE) for social change. And I see that removing that barrier in '47 for Jackie Robinson and later for Clemente, and now for women in Augusta, is on the same plane for sports to become a very pivotal factor in changing our social environment.
And so we make no apology about fighting to protect Title IX and fighting for gender equal equality for women. We make no apology about that.
BEGALA: So what are you calling on people to do?
JACKSON: We're calling on people to ask Hootie and the membership of that club to open up to women. Just that basic. If women can serve on the Supreme Court, if women can serve in the battlefield in Kuwait, and hopefully not, but possibly, Iraq, then women ought to have the right to (UNINTELLIGIBLE) of any place in America that's public that affirms their dignity.
CARLSON: Well, wait a second, Mr. Jackson. You are saying, you're comparing sex discrimination to racial discrimination. And yet -- and, in other words, you are taking what you claim as a standup principle. But I asked you a moment ago what you thought of Smith College excluding men. I'll ask you now what you think of women's organizations excluding men.
And I bet you don't care. Do you?
JACKSON: Well, it's according to the level. In other words, I think sororities can be all female or fraternities can be all male. But to compare an all-female sorority with an all-male fraternity with a country club so public (UNINTELLIGIBLE), where its membership largely are men sponsored by public corporations, to lock women out of the Masters Golf Tournament seems to me to be unfair.
CARLSON: It takes no federal money, unlike Smith College. I mean Augusta isn't a public club. It's a private club.
(CROSSTALK)
JACKSON: Well, just like the Brooklyn Dodgers are a privately owned baseball team, but the games used -- it was subsidized far beyond this ownership. The August Country Club is private, but its public subsidy is far beyond its membership. And I think the real issue, when you really add up what is happening now, kind of anti- civil rights, anti-affirmative action, anti-Title IX, KKK, Trent Lott, lock women out, we cannot go backwards, we must go forward.
CARLSON: KKK -- you devalue the term when you throw the term "KKK" around. Nobody in America, no normal person in any way sympathizes with the KKK. And to tie them to Trent Lott and the Augusta National Country Club is to do everyone a disservice and to devalue...
(APPLAUSE)
JACKSON: Well, if you don't connect Trent Lott with KKK and Citizens Council, then you are not a very well read person. If you...
CARLSON: It's an outrage you would say that.
JACKSON: If you do not connect racial and general religious bias, you cannot draw the lines between the dots. And it's your challenge to understand and to catch on.
BEGALA: Reverend Jesse Jackson, thank you very much for joining us from Chicago. Good to see you again.
JACKSON: Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE)
BEGALA: Next in "Fireback," one of our viewers wonders whose religious holiday will be next honored with the special terrorism alert. Stay tuned to find out.
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