Eventually, the courts dismissed the case. (The courts have consistently declared that these arguments lack merit.) And, while the Bush Administration opposed the NWCA in court, it only defended Title IX on “narrow procedural grounds, the National Women’s Law Center argued in “Slip-Sliding Away,” its illuminating study of gender policy. Instead of claiming that Title IX is a “fair and flexible” policy, government lawyers argued that the schools must remedy discrimination, not the Department of Education.

Next up, the Administration signaled to its “supporters that they were not abandoning them,” Samuels said, when in mid-2002 the Department of Education established the poorly-titled, “Commission on Opportunity in Athletics.” Writing in USA Today magazine, Asst. Professor at the Florida Coastal School of Law “Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who won three gold and one silver medal in the 1984 Olympics swimming competition, pointed out that Bush’s Commission was “hand-picked, weighted heavily against Title IX,” and that its purpose was “to eviscerate Title IX’s interpretive regulations via an end-run around the courts, congress and the will of the people.”

Adding weight to Hogshead-Makar’s charges, the commission’s final report recommended drastic changes to Title IX including harmful proposals that schools be allowed to use private donors to fund men’s teams; “artificially inflate the percentage of athletic opportunities they give to women,” and send bogus “interest surveys” to students to determine interest levels in sports among female students, as the commissioners Julie Foudy and Donna de Varona argued in their brave minority report–a document that then-Education Secretary Rod Paige declined to enter into the public record.

Fortunately, the Administration was forced to backtrack amid a din of public outrage, and the Education Department sent a letter to our nation’s schools reaffirming the mechanisms for enforcing Title IX as settled law. That happened in 2003. Fast forward to March 2005. Bush has secured a second term, the NCAA tournament was underway, and the Administration dropped its bombshell on a late Friday afternoon “with little fanfare–now schools could evade compliance with Title IX by using bogus email surveys.”

There’s an irony here: George W. Bush is a sports nut. He has appeared on the cover of Runner’s World, is a former owner of the Texas Rangers and he lifts weights and bikes in a gym. Adding to the irony, First Lady Laura Bush recently returned from her trip to Afghanistan highlighting the drive to secure womens’ rights in that long-suffering nation.

Apparently, real-life experiences are no match for the anti-democratic ideology that has dominated policy decisions in the Bush White House. Title IX, a cornerstone of the struggle for gender equality, must be defended.