USA Today columnist Nancy Armour recently criticized the Heritage Foundation for its stance on Title IX, shortly after experiencing backlash for her comments on Caitlin Clark. Armour referenced a report from the conservative think tank titled “Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity.” The report, released earlier this month, challenges the current application of the 1972 federal civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs or activities.
Scott Yenor, the report’s author and senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s American Citizenship Initiative, argued that stricter interpretations of the law have enforced a one-size-fits-all model in school sports, negatively affecting both male and female student athletes.
The report states, “Title IX evolved from a seemingly modest anti-discrimination statute into a powerful engine of feminist social engineering, complete with proportionality mandates.” The Heritage Foundation criticizes these mandates for fostering biases toward a male-centric competitive model in women’s sports and against men’s non-revenue sports programs.
Armour accused the organization of attempting to strip protections from female sports and roll back women’s rights. She wrote, “Our bodies, our self-confidence, our independence — they’re not going to stop until women have the same rights and opportunities they did before the 1970s. Which were almost none.”
Despite widespread support for Title IX, Armour voiced concerns about the potential impact of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which she claims seeks to enforce specific values and eliminate differing ones. She commented, “It’s also about enforcing a specific definition of femininity. It started with banning transgender women from sports. Now that that’s been accomplished, the Heritage Foundation and their ilk are going to try and make the rest of us women conform.”
Yenor counters Armour’s claims by advocating for Title IX reforms that emphasize opportunities in female-centric sports like cheerleading, gymnastics, and volleyball, rather than solely focusing on proportionality in male-dominated sports.
Yenor writes, “Equality under Title IX does not require identical outcomes or the erasure of sex differences. It requires opportunity rooted in human nature that will reveal genuine differences between the sexes.”
The debate over Title IX follows Armour’s previous controversial comments regarding Caitlin Clark, a WNBA player. Armour faced backlash and later apologized for a comparison she made to Emmett Till, acknowledging an “inartful comparison.” The column has since been updated.
Leave a Reply