Equality 2

Some time ago, I wrote about the injustice of girls playing on boys hockey teams and joining boys clubs when there were perfectly good girls teams and clubs available for them to join. The gist of the whole thing came down to whether or not we can have 'unisex' teams or leagues where boys/men compete equally with girls/women. There are any number of boys/men's teams or leagues, girls/women's teams or leagues and the mixed teams or leagues that pervade any sport known to mankind. (Wow, am I ever being politically correct here.)

One area of blatant inconsistency seems to be how we view criminals. Men seem to be much more picked on than women when it comes to the public view of how both sexes can commit the same crime, but end up being looked at differently.

When a man is arrested for killing his children, the community immediately labels him a monster and is ready to lynch him before he even gets to trial. But when a woman kills her own flesh and blood, we typically wonder what kind of difficult circumstances or mental anguish she must have endured before snapping. Why? Some men commit crimes because that's what men do, or so the thinking goes. But women offend because they didn't get the help they needed and they were at their wits' end. Bad women tend to elicit public sympathy. The other week an Ontario woman was charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her daughters, age three and one. If it had been a man, what would your first thoughts be? Hang the bastard, probably. But the world of liberal womanhood comes shining through. "This was a tormented woman," said one area resident, whose grandchildren had played with the girls. "This woman needs a hug. She needs to know people love her."

The accused killer Frances Elaine Campione, 31, has already been cast as an alleged victim in the deaths of her two defenceless children. "Imagine you are so desperate you want to take (the kids) away from the pain so they could be with the Lord," remarked the woman who said Campione needed a hug. Can you imagine a neighbour daring to say such a thing if the accused was male? Should we still be excusing women's offences when, in every other sphere of human endeavour, we insist on gender equality? Dealing the sympathy card for female offenders is misogynist in a sense because we assume bad women are unbalanced, says University of Alberta law professor Sanjeev Anand. "You're sort of taking away her autonomy as a human being - her ability to choose right from wrong," he says."Underneath that sympathy is almost a very degrading way of viewing women's autonomy." "We sort of accept that if it happens by a dad or a step-dad, well, that's just because men do that," he says. "But with women, we try to pathologize it."

If women's lib has made us all equal, then why are women treated differently when it comes to crime? Yes, there are many doing hard time for their actions, but our society is leaning more and more to the left when it comes to making people responsible for their actions. A lot of people couldn't fathom that Karla Homolka, for instance, could be willingly involved in the sex-killings of two teen girls, but we seem to have no problem believing that men are capable of these acts.

If the girls want to play on the boy's team, then let them play on the boy's team when it comes to outrage against them and the crimes they commit.