gender and golf

The Augusta National Golf Club is a private men's club. It also hosts one of the largest public golf tournaments held in the country -- the Masters. Martha Burk, the head of the National Council of Women's Organizations, has been lobbying support amongst sponsors of the event, and the media, to try to get the club to open its membership to women. Her efforts have been listened to, and it appears as though the tournament will be played next year without commercial sponsorship on television. (I'm not sure that I've ever seen a major sporting event on the small screen that hasn't been interrupted by commercials.) The UK's Guardian frames this as a battle between the first amendment right to assemble versus a moral obligation to not descriminate based upon gender, in an article called Par for the Course. By their account, Martha Burk is winning by a large margin.