Burk raises the bar in her game of rhetoric

Sorry, Martha Burk, you just lost me.

You say it is "appalling" that women soldiers can lay down their lives for democratic values but are shut out of Augusta National Golf Club.

I say the women fighting in Iraq are worried a lot more about sandstorms than sand traps.

You say it is an "insult" to the 250,000 women serving in the U.S. military that CBS is broadcasting the Masters from a club that discriminates.

I say that CBS isn't an evil conspirator against women by showing the tournament and that a lot of us relish a reprieve from the war by watching Tiger Woods among the azaleas and dogwoods for a few days.

You say, as president of the National Council of Women's Organizations, that there is a "clear link" between breaking down barriers at a golf club and fighting for ideals in Iraq.

I say one woman member, 100 or 1,000 at Augusta National is a raindrop in the storm of problems we're facing on all fronts in our society.

You say that the women of the armed forces understand your mission because they've struggled against discrimination in the military and that it's related to the scandals at the Air Force Academy -- "all part of a package of devaluing women."

I say that it is trivializing sexual assault and rape to bring them up in the same breath as sexual parity on the fairways.

Joining forces

Your friends -- "people of conscience" from a rainbow of political, civil rights, religious and women's groups -- got together Wednesday on the steps of New York's City Hall and said the protests against Augusta National are tied in with efforts to uphold the integrity of Title IX. They're "part of a chain," sports sociologist Cary Goodman said, linked to the boycotts against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and, for goodness sake, Rosa Parks sitting in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955.

Several city council members introduced a resolution condemning Augusta National's "gender segregation" and urging CBS not to broadcast the tournament.

"We find this morally offensive at a time when Saddam Hussein is gender eligible to be a member of Augusta, yet the woman who is an Iraqi POW is not," Charles Farrell, director of Rainbow Sports, a division of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow-PUSH coalition, intoned gravely.

"We condemned the Taliban for their treatment of women," added council member Yvette Clarke, "and here in the United States we still see vestiges of this extreme discrimination. ... Discrimination anywhere is a threat to our survival."

I say you're all making way too much of an issue that never was, and never deserved to be, anything more than a symbolic joust.

This isn't about millions of girls and women being held back. It's not about torture or lynchings or the repression of a race. It's about golf for wealthy women and making a slight crack in the glass ceiling of commerce.

I defended you, and still do, on your calls for Augusta National to open its doors to women members. Private club or not, it's the right thing to do at a place that is more than the home of the Masters and more than a hangout where rich guys golf and drink and bond in brotherly fellowship.

They're old boys who run dozens of the biggest companies in the country, keeping women out of their clique and out of any business chats on strolls past Amen Corner. Augusta National poses a small but real barrier and represents a symbolic one. It should change with the times.

I support your plans to protest near the front gates of Augusta National during the Masters in three weeks, and the federal lawsuit filed on your behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union against the local authorities who want to keep you away. Your issue is worthwhile, but it has been reduced by the rhetoric.

In the heat of these god-awful days, it is barely a blip on my radar of outrage.

I'm outraged by corrupt corporate executives, people out of work and an economy that's still flatlining.

I'm outraged at the gas "escape hoods" that were just passed out in my office in case of attack and by the fear that has intruded upon our lives.

I'm outraged that Canadian fans booed our national anthem and that Americans booed theirs.

Augusta National's membership? It is as tiny on my screen as one of Tiger Woods' drives streaking across the sky.

Steve Wilstein is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press.