The King and Queen of the Prom
Bill O'Reilly and Martha Burk
May 12, 2003
Little did Martha Burk realize that her fetching dance around the fringe of Augusta National’s Masters tournament would catch the smitten eye of television icon Bill O’Reilly. Yet, within months of the Burk Follies, O’Reilly discovered that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Not to be one-upped by a feminazi demagogue deciding the starting foursome, the human foghorn of talk television now wants to name the dance card. Well, gosh darn, damn the Constitution…I’ve got Georgia on my mind.
O’Reilly’s condemnation of a segregated high school prom in Butler, Georgia is a case study in DemagogueSpeak… proselytizing while the brain is segregated from the mouth.
Some students from Taylor County High privately organized an all white prom. And privately is an operative descriptor because no tentacle of government was involved in the planning, support, financing or any aspect of the event. Always on the prowl for a good controversy, O’Reilly seized the moment with outrage befitting the Trisha Meili saga, “…exclude(ing) students on the basis of skin color, ethnicity, religion, or any other defining characteristic is cruel, un-American, and should be condemned by all responsible public officials….”
By his same logic, O’Reilly should similarly condemn Smith College, the three race-based dormitories at Cornell University and the Congressional Black Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. And by his same illogic, O’Reilly should just confess that he is clueless about the last 20 years of Supreme Court decisions concerning freedom of association. Hey Bill…there is more to minority rights than populism.
Unlike the Taylor County prom, discrimination by gender and race as practiced at single-sex women’s colleges, Congressional Caucuses and universities throughout the nation is taxpayer supported. The Taylor students, as private citizens in a private venue, were simply exercising their right to free association unlike the taxpayer subsidized women at Wellesley College who benefit from, “an excellent liberal arts education for women.”
Freedom of association is an inferred Constitutional right derived from the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Ironically, the relatively recent judicial recognition of the right to association emanated from Supreme Court rulings guaranteeing the rights of civil rights protestors. There is a prohibition on free association if it is for criminal purposes or if an organization has more than 400 members and is primarily business oriented.
The last major free association ruling by the Court actually gave private citizens greater latitude to decide with whom, when and where to associate. In Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, a majority of the Court held that New Jersey’s anti-discrimination law violated the Boy Scouts of America’s right to associate and its right to free speech because the law required the BSA to admit a homosexual scout leader. The O’Reilly ruling in BSA v. Dale is, “That's my advice to all homosexuals, whether they're in the Boy Scouts, or in the Army or in high school: Shut up, don't tell anybody what you do, your life will be a lot easier.”
To condemn the students of Taylor County High who simply exercised their right to free association is repressive. To call for protests and condemnation of these students by governmental officials as O’Reilly has done makes the repression even more repressive. Even Martha Burk is standing on firmer sod because Augusta National receives some property tax concessions and thus a form of taxpayer subsidy. A politically correct evisceration of these Georgia students is a lesson in the tyranny of dogma, not civil rights.
It was once said that, “Freedom is Choice and Choice is Freedom. Without Choice there is no Freedom.” The Georgia students exercised their legal right to choose and that was their choice. There are far worse instances of discrimination in America and many are far less legal. In dining halls on university campuses throughout this nation there are ad hoc “black sections” where a white could be lynched for inadvertently sitting to eat lunch. Or, there is always the Black Federal Employees Council (BFEC) of the Greater Kansas City Federal Executive Board. And sorry boys, you won’t be matriculating at Mount Holyoke College in the near future.
If it is not taxpayer funded, governmentally sanctioned or excluding groups of people from economic opportunity, the right of free association is nobody’s business other than those who are associating. Or, as a Black Muslim told the members of the Cornell College Republicans as he escorted them out of an “open” meeting at the university’s black
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