Since it's Black History Month, here's a little black-history lesson for you.
Once upon a time, blacks couldn't go to schools with whites, especially in the South. There was something called the separate-but-equal doctrine that allowed states to keep their schools segregated.
Back in the '50s, though, the Supreme Court ruled that separate-but-equal was unconstitutional. And, for years now, we thought it was a relic of its era, along with bobby socks and saddle shoes.
But you know how it is with fashion. It always comes back.
And separate-but-equal has made a huge comeback. It's not a race issue anymore. It's a gender issue.
Maybe you read about it. In a federal appeals court in Virginia, two judges out of three ruled that all-male Virginia Military Institute, a state-supported college, did not have to allow women.
You're going to love the rationale for this decision, particularly if you're a nostalgia buff.
The court agreed with the state of Virginia's proposition that VMI remain all male so long as it provided a "separate but substantially comparable" education elsewhere for women.
If you're keeping score, "substantially comparable" is even less than equal. For example, baseball and football are "substantially comparable," and yet possibly quite different.
Those women who want to attend VMI -- no, I don't know why they'd want to either -- can instead attend a state-financed program at Mary Baldwin, a private women's college in Staunton. The program will offer something called "leadership education" with some level of military training.
(You don't want too much military training for women -- not if you trust Newt Gingrich, who recently suggested that women may be unsuited for certain kinds of combat because, if they're left for 30 days in a ditch, "they get infections.")
In fact, the Mary Baldwin program will be more substantially different than substantially comparable with VMI's.
For example, it won't have the famous rat lines -- which, the way I see it, is a major advantage.
It won't have the famous VMI old-boy network, either.
Of course, that is largely beside the point. Even if the education opportunities were far closer to equal, segregation still wouldn't be fair. Why shouldn't women have the right to attend any school that is supported with their taxes?
What's at risk? The military academies seem to have survived the gender invasion pretty much intact, if you don't count the times at the Naval Academy that some male Midshipmen chain the occasional female Mid to a sink.
For 166 years, VMI has been a military school that produces what it likes to call citizen soldiers. Stonewall Jackson used to be a teacher. George C. Marshall was an alumnus. It has a gloried history, which includes sending a bunch of students to slaughter in a Civil War battle.
Once, the school made perfect sense in a state where segregation of races and sexes was the rule. At the University of Virginia, for example, there were no women and virtually no blacks until the '70s.
At the university, they held a series of plebiscites on the issue of whether to allow women. I was there for one. The students voted overwhelmingly against women because, well, their presence would inalterably change the essence of a Virginia education, which revolved, of course, around what academicians referred to as the road trip.
Now, the university's population is around 50-50, and yet the school seems to have survived.
And yet, the appeals court still was able to find that VMI must be allowed to retain -- these guys need better writers -- its "homogeneity of gender." Whatever that means.
It's so dumb, so antediluvian, that you can't believe it's actually an issue in 1995. If VMI and The Citadel -- the other state-supported all-male military school, the one in South Carolina where Shannon Faulkner is still trying to become a full-fledged student -- want to continue to play their little all-male war games, then they ought to do it on their own dime.
As of now, VMI takes about $10 million a year from the state of Virginia. It seems to me the school has two choices: Give up the money or give up its homogeneity of gender. Eventually the case should reach the Supreme Court, which, if it can remember 40 years back, ought to reach the same conclusion.