For 64 years, the good ol' boy Texas Tech Saddle Tramps have been known across their state as an exclusive booster club, one that's always and only had male members.
Then one Jennifer Slattery applied for membership.
The Saddle Tramps say she wasn't denied admission because she's a woman, but she decided to sue anyway.
Still, as the Associated Press reported at the time, "the 50-member group has applied for male-only legal designation that would exempt it from an anti-discrimination law.
The controversy has evolved into a case of tradition versus tolerance.
" Hold on there! Tradition versus tolerance? That makes it sound as if our American traditions on the one hand, and tolerance on the other, are mutually exclusive.
Please! Somehow, I doubt the ol' Saddle Tramps waste much time plotting cultural warfare against feminists or seeking out unsuspecting women and locking them in a kitchen to bake cookies.
Sadly, though, the definition of "tolerance" seems to have "evolved" from the notion of live and let live to a kind of meaningless "forced friendliness.
" If you don't endorse what everyone else does, why, then you are some kind of "hater.
" Do-gooder government? It turns out that the prospective member, Jennifer, had publicly expressed a very low opinion of these fifty rowdy, raucous cowboys.
She apparently thought of them as sweaty, horse-mounted buffoons and may have thought that suing them out of existence would be a great culture war victory.
It's as if a young Jane Fonda confronted four dozen Texas football fans with a demand to join their club and turn the tailgate parties into food service for the homeless (a great thing, but there are other groups doing that).
All of this furious posturing is done to make a point, which is this: "I can get the cops and the bureaucrats to make you let me join.
" In Jennifer's case, she quite possibly can do that, which would suggest that we're now completely at the mercy of do-gooder government.
You will now be required to like everybody, or at least pretend convincingly.
Everybody has to enjoy (or pretend to enjoy) hanging around with everybody else.
If you don't, you're busted, sued, bankrupted and, perhaps worst of all, branded with the "scarlet I" for "intolerant.
" So now it's going to be state-enforced bonding and sharing? Man, I don't even talk to my own friends all the time, much less hang out with them all day, every day.
And one of the reasons I'm a longtime, happily married man is that I don't insist my wife accompany me everywhere, share my every interest, like the same food or anything else.
Please, I really am an adult.
I really do go through quite a process deciding which folks I'm going to be friends with, and how.
Isn't this supposed to be up to me? Isn't this called "freedom of association"? Including vs.
excluding I don't do certain things or go certain places to exclude certain people.
I do those things and go those places to be around certain people.
If you're one of them - for me that means family, friends, other high-tech folks, video security and surveillance pros, fans of the same teams, etc.
- then we'll connect because of the shared interest, not because you're my neighbor or business associate.
And if you are a neighbor or business associate, but don't share my passions and interests, you might as well be from Mars or Venus or wherever.
Family, friends, community and self make for a delicate balancing act.
I don't need any judges or bureaucrats tipping the scales.
I would like to pick my own friends.
Is that now becoming too much to ask in America in the third millennium?