When Women Aren’t Wanted : Rotary Club gets all worked up over admitting female member

As if a throwback to an earlier era, several members of the Garden Grove Rotary Club balked this week at admitting a woman to their local chapter. One Rotarian concluded that he was opposed to “Girl Scouts becoming Boy Scouts,” and that the woman had “no right to be there.”

To the contrary, the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken clearly on the issue of membership in such organizations--and on Rotary, in particular. In a long-running case involving a chapter in Duarte, the high court ruled in 1987 that Rotary was “not sufficiently intimate or private” to warrant constitutional protection to private association.

As it had in an earlier case involving the all-male Jaycees, the court ruled that such organizations, with potentially large memberships and many public and civic activities, did not have a right to refuse women as members.

Indeed, in an even more recent case involving the New York Athletic Club, the justices ruled that private clubs with large membership rosters, that serve meals regularly and rent their facilities to outsiders, are more like business establishments than intimate social groups. Such clubs have no right to escape anti-discrimination regulations that apply to businesses, the court said.

In the Garden Grove incident, Woo England of Pasadena, a bank vice president in Garden Grove who previously had been a Rotarian in Arcadia, was accepted for membership by Garden Grove Rotary’s board of directors. But several members asked the general membership to overturn the decision. The vote was 26-26 with three abstentions; a two-thirds vote is required to overturn. England thus joins 27,000 females in the 1.1-million member worldwide club.

But the persistence of this controversy--and the fact that half the club’s voters don’t want a woman member--are disheartening. This is a battle women already have won and shouldn’t have to keep fighting. It’s ridiculous that the news apparently hasn’t been absorbed by all of Rotary’s troops.