In a case its executive director is calling unprecedented, the Kansas State High School Activities Association is looking into a Feb. 2 incident where a woman referee, Michelle Campbell, was barred from officiating a boys basketball game.

The game was at St. Mary’s Academy, a private religious school 25 miles northwest of Topeka, so you know it's a progressive kind of town. Before the game started, a school administrator approached Campbell’s officiating partner, Darin Putthoff of Topeka, and told him a woman could not serve as referee.

And what was his rationale? Having a woman ref would be putting a woman in a position of authority over boys — a scenario that was contrary to beliefs at St. Mary’s Academy.

Lovely, St. Mary's Academy also teaches boys that women should remain pregnant and barefoot and always be in the kitchen.

If you're wondering what kind of school St. Mary's is, well here you go.

The school is owned and operated by the Society of St. Pius X, a group founded in 1970 in response to reforms that the Roman Catholic Church initiated with the Second Vatican Council. The group follows pre-Vatican II practices, such as the Latin Mass. Pope John Paul II excommunicated the society’s world leader, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, in the late 1980s.

Man, the Kansas State High School Activities Association should be glad the school didn't burn Campbell at the stake.

Anyway, I'm at least glad to report that Cambell's colleagues walked off the court with her and refused to ref the game.

This also isn't the first time St. Mary's has gotten in trouble.

This is not the first time this type of controversy has surrounded the school. In 2004, St. Mary’s chose to forfeit a football game against White City High School because White City had a girl on its roster. At the time, an official in the U.S. district office for the Society of St. Pius X told a paper, “We’re trying to form the boys to be gentlemen, and knocking a girl around on a football field is the furthest thing from that. … It’s not a game for girls, and not a game for boys to play against girls.”

Of course not, we only want our boys messing around with the priests, not girls.

I'd keep insulting this school, but at this point, it's like shooting ducks in a barrel. Too often we point to religion as being a serious problem in terms of limiting peoples' rights abroad. Funny thing is, it's happening just around the corner here as well.