The cause for women's rights celebrates a triumph, then suffers a defeat in just two days.

A decade ago, these young all-star selections were evidence of the success of Title IX.

I will not lie to you. There are times when I look at the direction in which this country is headed, and I fear for its future.

That vantage point was attained even though I am still one of the most protected members of our society -- an aging, white, heterosexual male, one that has enjoyed far more privilege over my 68 years on this earth to the point where I not only didn't understand or fully appreciate what I had, but I also have no idea how to spend what's left in my remaining days. 

Outside of the norms of society, no one has ever told me what I can do with my own body. I can eat, sleep, work, play, fornicate or defecate whenever and wherever I want, save for instances where some of those actions would be totally inappropriate in a social setting. The only time I was told I couldn't play sports was when it was proven that I was not good enough at them to satisfy the requirements of the meritocracy that is competitive athletics. And outside of the legalities surrounding mingling with the opposite sex, there are no laws applicable to my participation in mutually-agreed-upon activities that might result in reproduction.

Yet here we are in the fourth week of June, the Year of Our Lord 2022, and in the past two days, it has been driven home to me just how badly women have it in these United States of America.

Thursday should have been, and hopefully was, a reminder of one of the great moments of triumph for American women. It was the 50th anniversary of the addition of just 37 words to the Education Amendments of 1972 -- a passage called Title IX that opened the doors to millions of women to receive equal access to opportunities in athletics in colleges and high schools.

"No person in the United States," they read, "shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Title IX opened the door, all right. Several states, including Massachusetts, followed up with their own statutes underscoring those provisions where state funding was concerned. And the changes those acts wrought were truly culture-changing.

In 1971, the year of my graduation from Mansfield High School, Title IX did not exist. Sports for boys were numerous and coaches had experience in their disciplines. But that was not the case for girls. For the most part, schools offered field hockey, basketball, softball and tennis, and that was it.

Just a year earlier, in fact, Massachusetts changed over from the peculiar six-girl basketball rules that allowed only three players to cross center court, restricted players to just one dribble and a pass, and let the center stand all day in the lane without penalty. At Mansfield High, the long-time female physical education teacher that coached all sports turned over the reins of the girls' basketball team to a young English teacher whose best qualification for the job was that she was single and available for after-school duties.

Jackie Cross, left, plays in a boys-girls exhibition
game at Mansfield High in 1971.

My high school sweetheart, Jacqueline Cross, was the center of that team. She was 5-foot-11, slender but athletic, who had received very little true coaching in the nuances of any kind of basketball, let alone the game that she and her teammates were forced to learn once "boys' rules" were in place.

Despite all that, she loved to play. She certainly drew more than her share of three-second violations during the transition from one set of rules to another, but she adapted and did her best. In hindsight, I look back at her and try to envision what kind of a player she would have been with today's quality of coaching, today's training equipment and the nurturing atmosphere that Title IX brought to women's sports, and I think she would have been a good one -- and that is said with the full knowledge that in my 40-plus years with the local newspaper, I saw a lot of very good players, many going on to excel in college, including one that was one of the best in the nation during her career.

Title IX made that possible. It was a slow start and change didn't happen overnight. Girls didn't start wearing actual basketball uniforms instead of baggy jumpsuits until the mid-'70s. Coaching hires and practice availability didn't improve immediately. Some schools, including Attleboro High, relegated girls' basketball to a small side gymnasium instead of where the boys played. Even Boston College didn't grant its women's team regular access to the Conte Forum on a regular basis until the late 1990s, instead forcing the women to play in an adjacent practice gym.

For most of our local girls, their teams played in the afternoons, before small crowds, while the boys played at night and got all the fanfare. In my role as a high school sports reporter for the weekly Mansfield News, I had to choose between the two because of travel, and the paper wanted only the boys' games covered, so it was that on an afternoon of shooting baskets outside her house, Jackie asked me why I never came to watch her games.

My response: "It's only girls' basketball."

Worst statement I ever made in my life. 

I will never forget the hurt and disappointment in her eyes. And yet it still took about seven or eight more years, in my early years at The Sun Chronicle, for pressure from local coaches to work its way through my thick skull and prompt me to start directing the sports department to provide better coverage for all girls' sports.

It was tough at first. People resisted the change. A lot of male sports fans thought we were taking something away from the coverage of their sports, when in truth we were adding more pages and more column inches of coverage. There was even some reluctance among the management of the paper to devote more resources to covering girls' sports or giving them equal play. And of course, there were the peculiar knuckle-draggers that found the need to personally insult me, accusing me of deviant behavior and attacking my reputation, just because I covered girls' sports and actually enjoyed them.

Former Feehan star Katie Nelson.

But as the saying goes, we persevered. The Sun Chronicle became a better newspaper because of it. And today, while the coverage of women's pro sports is still a distant second fiddle to the men's pro leagues, there isn't a newspaper (among those that remain, that is) that would not offer equal coverage to boys and girls at the high school level.

Consistent to that theme of being ahead of the curve, I wrote my tributes to Title IX 10 years ago, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the legislation. Several stories ran over a four-day period, highlighting the progress made by athletes I interviewed, who ranged in age from 16 to 74. Fortunately, all of those I interviewed are still with us and have witnessed further progress -- although there are still a few instances when I'm irritated that a school hasn't opened all of its bleachers for the girls' game even though Title IX mandates equal access to facilities.

Some glaciers move (or melt) more slowly than others.

In general, Title IX has been a positive thing for America as a whole -- and it's hard to believe that it was signed into law by one of the worst presidents this nation ever had, Richard M. Nixon. Paranoid and vindictive as he was, Nixon was not a stupid man. He respected the rights of all Americans (if not the Constitution that gave him his authority), and thus his signature on the Education Amendments of 1972 may actually represent one of the few high points of his morally corrupt administration.

So, Thursday should have been a day of celebration. That changed abruptly with the cowardly news dump on Friday that the Supreme Court of the United States had voted 6-3 to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion by a 7-2 vote in 1973. We all knew it was coming following that celebrated leak of the draft version of the opinion, but it became official just in time for all of the justices to hotfoot it out of town for what I expect will be a very long hiatus.

I will not get into a theological or moral debate over abortion. I do not consider myself qualified in the slightest to establish the moment when life begins in the womb, or when a fetus would be viable to survive outside it. I don't have the credentials to say the exact moment when a soul enters the vessel, or if there is even such a thing. I tend to subscribe to the theories that mankind has always created "gods" to explain away what they didn't understand.

All I know is that women do not have the same rights as men in a country where it was proclaimed in a document of some note that "all men (and that really should be amended to include women) are created equal."

The Constitution, as written three centuries ago, reflects the society of the times. Men ruled the roost, and they were all one color. Black men and women brought over from Africa could still be sold as slaves. And all women had just one purpose -- to make babies.

Slavery wasn't ended until 1865. Women got the right to vote in 1920. Yet in both instances, vestiges of old prejudices remain and they continue to divide our country. We could have elected a woman president in 2016, and more people voted for her than the ignoramus that won in the Electoral College, but that glass ceiling remains unshattered.

Concentrating solely upon women's issues, because that's what's in the news today, women still don't make the same as men in comparable jobs. Fewer opportunities are presented to them, and workplace harassment continues to be an omnipresent issue facing those that endure it.

As I said at the top of this missive, no one would dare pass legislation that would so severely restrict a man's control over his own body, particularly his reproductive organs -- although I've suggested many times that the Second Amendment remains in place to compensate some men for what they didn't get at birth. In a nutshell: Big gun? Small penis.

Reaction to Friday's ruling was swift.

I can just imagine the howls of protest that would hail from old white men of Republican leaning if Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and other female legislators (hell, let's throw Hillary Clinton in there just to torment the right wing even further) banded together to pass legislation to restrict the number of ejaculations a man could have, or the number of times he could legally have sex, the number of potential partners he could have, and the number of children he could father. Or maybe the Christian right could convince legislators that every ejaculation is an exercise in murdering potential children because from among the millions of sperm that get the chance, only one is needed to fertilize an egg. Oh, the potential humanity!

Yes, it's nonsense. But so is the premise argued by Justice Clarence Thomas that the SCOTUS should review other past decisions that cover contraception or same-sex marriages. I note that he did not include decisions that legalized interracial marriage (as he is a participant in one), but let's face it -- there are a whole lot of ignorant rednecks in certain parts of this country that still haven't accepted that part of normal modern-day society.

Almost 50 years ago, women in America got the chance to have a measure of control over their own bodies. That was taken away in a big way Friday, although some states will be safe havens for legal abortion because their laws and their state Supreme Court decisions have turned Roe v. Wade into state law.

What surely troubles me, and should trouble anyone with a brain, are the states that passed "trigger" laws that wiped out any and all forms of legal abortion once Roe v. Wade was overturned. Some of those states have banned ALL forms, even when the life of the mother is threatened by a failed pregnancy. Or what about a violent rape that results in a pregnancy? The most heinous violation of all, and the victim must be forced to carry her attacker's child to term? The potential for life-long psychological suffering for both mother and child is staggering.

I can't even imagine it, in fact. I'm a man. I can never be forced to make that decision or live with its consequences. And that's why I have always believed that I (or anyone else with a penis) lack the right equipment or life experience to dictate what decisions a woman should be forced to make regarding her own body.

Yes, we have become a nation with more respect for an unborn fetus's existence than for the lives of young schoolchildren that may die in a hail of bullets because the small-dicked gun lobby can't envision life without their AR-15s by their sides.

I am profoundly sorry as I write this. I'm sorry that for women all over this country, triumph one day turned to tragedy the next. I'm sorry that men have given you another reason to look at all of us as "the bad guys" in all this. I'm even sorry for the curious preponderance of women in some parts of the country that allow their warped, fundamentalist religious beliefs to trap them in a web of continued subservience to their male partners. They fail to take responsibility for their own existence because their God tells them that's so -- and in that, they have become traitors to their gender and traitors to a nation, effectively blocking the efforts of our Constitution to offer full and righteous equality to all of its citizens.

If women throughout America would rise up in unison to reject this draconian decision, it would be reversed. I fully believe that. 

One last note -- I was warned earlier today that this was not a day in which any man should be telling women that they NEED to do something, but I disagree. We're not getting the job done, ladies, so you must. My most fervent wish is that you succeed where we have failed.