The discrimination against women that is blatantly displayed in the Augusta National should be blacked out on national airwaves. Broadcasting events and programs over the nation's airwaves is a controlled national common asset under the regulation of the FCC. One way of stamping out this arrogant group is to throw them into darkness and irrelevance. Allowing them to broadcast the event and to profit from the broadcast (this year Sony will be the main sponsor: see http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/...) is criminal as it is a slap in the face to America's laws supporting equal opportunity. The FCC could go further in that the PGA broadcasts their other events on TV and cable. The FCC could require the PGA to expel Augusta to maintain the right to broadcast. What is stopping the Obama administration and the Justice Department from doing this? Arguments that the Augusta group is not actually violating the law by preventing women from joining is the same argument as Southerners made in creating and defending the Jim Crow laws. It was the determination of the union of other states that pressed the South in the 1950s and 1960s and led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act that broke the fiction of states rights and the idea that businesses have the right to practice discrimination on their private property. That is the same as saying that they could hold people as slaves on their property and ignore the law of the land.
Lincoln and Johnson after him tried to divide the South by offering pardons for rebels. As Southerners were given voting rights back the elected racist legislatures. These new legislatures passed the Black Codes, severely limiting the former slaves' legal rights and economic options so as to force them to return to the plantations as dependent laborers. Some states limited the occupations open to blacks. None allowed any blacks to vote, or provided public funds for their education. This had little effect to slow or end the war. After the surrender of the Southern armies war continued with large Union forces held down in guerrilla war from Alabama to South Carolina. Major uprisings took place as in Louisiana. If one recalls the Force Act of 1870 and of 1871 as well as the illegal sections act concerning South Carolina, we find the basis for our dilemma. The founding of the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, Redeemers, White League and the murderous rampages they set upon freed African Americans, Republicans and collaborating (good American citizens) left the South at continued disorder and chaos during U.S. Grant's administration. Congress passed the above acts to control the continued rebellion. This set the stage for over 100 years of struggle over states rights, "free association," Jim Crow laws and supposedly private men's clubs all of which were organized to restrain the rights of African Americans in the South and maintain control by racist organizations. Over the 50 years from 1870 to the 1920s Southern "states' rights" politicians strived to undermine the laws that had made slavery and the Jim Crow laws illegal. A third Force Act in 1872 led to nine South Carolina counties being placed under martial law and thousands of arrests.
In 1882, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Ku Klux Klan Act unconstitutional, this opened the way for the resumption of the Jim Crow laws, establishing white racism as the law of the South. Legal struggle for equal rights of U.S. African American soldiers, for equal housing and employment opportunity slowly undermined the idea of states' rights and the subterfuge of private property being the shield for racism. In Brown v. the Board of Education and a number of other Supreme Court decisions the legal foundations of states' rights crumbled. While legal excuses for equality had been destroyed, the law of the land was still not enforced. It took a continued legal battle and massive protests throughout the 1950s and 1960s with occupation by U.S. Marshals and Federal Troops to suppress public racist white organized resistance. While the various "Ku Klux Klan Acts" made organizing to break or resist Federal laws illegal (like the Augusta National is) the creation of the RICO acts and the Patriot Act essentially reinstate this concept and could be used to break illegal behavior like that of Augusta National.
Efforts to undermine the power of the Federal government and its powers to protect all citizens' rights are generally a simple cover for gaining racist control again. Much of the propaganda for states' rights we see today, whether it be Tea Party disguised, falls under the same category. One cannot understand what is happening today without knowing the history of Reconstruction. Just a look at one of the major organizations involved in this push, A.L.E.C. (http://www.alec.org/)makes clear the goal (see a break down of contributors: http://www.alecexposed.org/...).