I think I can partly see Stone's point of view in this situation, but I can also understand the point of the opposition. This, however, is based upon my view of "private" associations with large public exposure. For example, Stone mentioned the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts are considered a private organization, yet every time there's a major holiday or some sort of cause you see them out in public begging you to buy candy bars or to take your Christmas tree away. Pretty much anyone you run into will know that the Boy Scouts organization teaches kids basic survival skills in the wilderness, teamwork, and public service along with other useful skills and virtues. The problem with the Boy Scouts is that they are using stupid "evidence" as an excuse to disallow an entire type of person from joining. They depict all homosexuals as predators, out to have sex with young boys, so they won't let them be Scoutmasters. This opinion is based on an assumption that all gay men are also pedophiles - something you would joke about with your friends in a house just to be funny. They also cite religious reasons, passages from the Bible (a book made up by men). It's actually kind of ironic; in researching the topic for a paper in a sociology class back at Southern I found zero cases where a homosexual Scoutmaster made even an advance at a Scout, yet what's all over the news? Priests molesting altar boys. Regardless, though, the Boy Scouts use outdated reasoning, laughably antiquated excuses like, "Man, gay people have no morals or family values!"
But that's off the topic of golf and Augusta National, though. Right now, from what I understand, women essentially just want to play the course. Obviously, if you give them free run of the course, they'll eventually want into the Masters. They televise the Masters tournament, but do they send a camera crew out every time some golf pro plays the course regularly? No, they don't. The club has a right to not let women play the course since Fox isn't there night and day to film Joe Person's -6 game. It's a constitutional right, and if the members don't want women playing, then too bad. Open your own course and exclude men from playing.
My question, though, is why? I can't, for the life of me, think of any reason to disavow female golfers from playing the Augusta National course. Like, denying a black man membership in the KKK I can understand. Not letting a hardline conservative Jew into the Aryan Brotherhood I can also understand. Tossing a tree-hugging hippie who rides a regular bicycle everywhere out of the Hell's Angels is yet another foreseeable conclusion. And I pretty much disagree with all of those organizations. But what, exactly, are women going to do if they play the course? Are the members of the Augusta club afraid they're going to go play the front nine one morning and find tampons and a stack of burned bras on the grass? What? I see Stone's reasoning behind this - I can't stand watching golf on TV (I'm so bad that I can't even stand watching myself play sometimes), but I think it'd be really crappy to have them take the Masters off of television over this topic. I just don't understand exactly why women are being excluded from the private course. Maybe I need some more enlightenment on the subject, I dunno.
Oh yeah, and if you're a private organization, stop fucking pushing Kit Kat bars on me when I walk out of the goddamned grocery store, shitheads.
Knaa'mean?