Even schools that do not belong to the association -- i.e., St. Mary's -- must apply for the association's approval each year if they want to be allowed to schedule games with member schools.
"Bowden said the association would take a closer look at St. Mary's application next summer," the Star reported. " ? If St. Mary's doesn't qualify as an approved team next year, the school wouldn't be able to schedule games against association member teams."
"They would have to go out of state or find other approved or not approved schools to play," said Bowden.
This is a Jim Crow-like system that discriminates against high schools that choose to take a traditional and gentlemanly view of the way boys ought to behave toward girls: Schools that won't force teenage boys to hit teenage girls if they want to play football are separate -- but not equal.
Under the Friday-night lights of Kansas we are seeing a little preview of the prospective endgame for the overall cultural war if the busybodies of the American left manage to win it. These petty tyrants are not satisfied with the freedom to behave as their consciences tell them to behave. They want to force everybody else to behave like they do, too -- even if this means forcing traditionalists to act against abiding standards of civilized behavior and their own well-formed consciences.
Just last month, for example, the Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to a California law that requires the Catholic Church to buy insurance that provides artificial contraceptives to church employees, even though artificial contraception is against the settled teaching of the church. Four years ago, in a 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the Supreme Court ruled that a state government could not force the Boy Scouts to have gay scoutmasters.
Will that decision -- and the fundamental principle of liberty it preserves -- stand under a new chief justice?
On the doorsteps of our churches, around the campfires of our Boy Scouts, on the football fields of Kansas, seeds are being sown today that will determine how free America is tomorrow.