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McCain gets another "fact" wrong

By Erin Buzuvis, Sudha Setty, and Kristine Newhall

Not much attention is being paid to John McCain's campaign these days. But occasionally we get to hear about some misinformation the Republican candidate for president has been perpetuating, usually involving some confusion over Iran versus Iraq. But this time he's really done it:
The U.S. Department of Education under President Clinton took liberties in interpreting the law and without debate determined that universities must fund men's and women's sports programs in proportion to the ratio of male to female students, or else lose federal funding for any part of the university including financial aid. In doing so, the adverse consequence of this interpretation unfortunately has been that many schools have adopted policies of strictly equal funding for male and female athletic programs. Unfortunately, many popular athletic programs have been cut because the overall amount of funding available for athletics programs will not sustain identical men's and women's programs in every sport.
This wasn't even an on-the-spot response at a news conference. USA Today writers posed the same questions to each of the remaining candidates. I guess, as I have pointed out so many times before, if sports writers across the country cannot accurately explain Title IX, it shouldn't be expected that the guy who wants to be the next leader of the country can either.
I would really like to ask McCain to list all the athletic programs that equally fund their men's and women's athletic programs. Most athletic programs do not even obtain a 50/50 split let alone a proportional one, which, technically, is okay because THAT'S NOT WHAT TITLE IX CALLS FOR nor has that ever been the interpretation under any presidential administration.
What the other candidates had to say: Obama supports the High School Sports Information Collection Act, does not support the survey policy, and believes the growing number of complaints filed with OCR is indicative of ongoing sex discrimination. Clinton's answer was a little more nebulous. She supports the continued enforcement of Title IX and disagrees with the survey policy.

Full post as published by Title IX Blog on May 10, 2008 (boomark / email).