Fundie Catholic school forfeits to avoid shame of third loss

Here’s the thing: Mesa Prep’s high school baseball team went undefeated.

That’s the high school team in the Arizona Charter Athletic Association for which Paige Sultzbach plays second base.

Mesa Prep won the charter league state championship by forfeit after Our Lady of Sorrows — a fundamentalist Catholic school — refused to play in the championship game because Mesa had a girl playing second base.

The teams played each other twice earlier in the season, with Sultzbach sitting out both games because they were at Our Lady of Sorrows, where Mesa deferred to the patriarchal school’s “no girls allowed” policy. And even without their starting player at second base, Mesa swept both games.

All of which is to say that I don’t buy the claim by Our Lady of Sorrows that its forfeit of the championship game is some kind of principled stand for its anti-female religious beliefs. They just knew they were going to get their butts kicked. Again. So they wimped out.

Discrimination, after all, is usually about fear. So when Our Lady of Sorrows tells us that they’re opposed to girls, what they’re probably telling us is that they’re afraid of them. The school’s actions bear that out.

Speaking of baseball, bigotry and fearful idiots refusing to take the field, here is the story of three Baptist churches from Missouri fleeing a church softball league because one of the other churches in the league has a pastor who is bisexual.

The pastor doesn’t actually play on the softball team, not that it really matters.

I say this often, but God have mercy it must be exhausting to live so obsessed with the tribal culture wars that you can’t even enjoy a softball game without worrying about whether or not everyone on the opposing team is at least six degrees removed from all the many things you consider offensive.

And speaking of high school girls’ athletics, two big pieces of news from my family’s weekend trip to Pittsburgh:

1. The Downingtown RFC Dingoes — both the girls and the boys teams — are officially Pennsylvania state champions.

2. Next up for the Dingoes is the regional tournament next weekend. Unfortunately, only one of our daughters will be playing. Our older daughter injured her foot in Sunday’s game — breaking the navicular bone. She’s looking at six weeks in a cast, but no ligament damage and, we hope, no long-term effects.