Brother, the good folks over at St. Mary’s Academy stumbled into a hornet’s nest when they decided recently to pass on a female referee for one of the academy’s boys basketball games. Someone apparently didn’t send them the memo on gender politics. The battle is over.

Don’t even try to explain this transgression away as an attempt to surround young men with more male role models. It won’t fly. End of discussion. They are wrong. Verdict rendered.

Shucks, starting this column with “brother” is almost as wrong. Women read newspapers. No one has the right to leave them out of the equation with such a silly, subtle sexist assumption. Words matter. No slight goes unpunished.

So you would have to figure some at the academy could have seen this train of public backlash coming down the track — even in the middle of Kansas. Only a fool would come to the academy’s defense.

Say hello to a fool. I know better, but I can’t help it. I’m a sucker for lost causes. Call me Jude. I also believe deeply that no matter how thin you pour the batter every pancake has two sides. A dialogue on even the more contentious topics should be healthy, not dangerous, for society in general.

Still, I understand that I am going to lose this one in the court of public opinion. That’s why I am going to drag my wife into this mess. I generally try to keep her out of the column. In this case, there is something about her that few people know but that speaks to this very issue.

Many years ago at a church where we once lived, my wife rose to a key leadership job that included the job of finding people to fill the church’s many boards. Quietly, she followed a philosophy of making sure that for every woman appointed to a board, a man would also be added to the leadership mix. Her quest served two purposes:

Church boards may have at one time been laden with old white guys. But in recent years and at many churches, women have grown to dominate the hierarchy that guides a congregation.

There are obvious reasons for this. Women are apparently more willing to commit the time needed to serve a church. Plus, informal head counts at that church — and others — would indicate that fewer men are sticking with religion. That meant fewer candidates to tap. But convincing men to take part in the leadership of church, she believed, would give those men an ownership in a church that would lead to a longer commitment (and more men in the pews).

Her second goal may sound a bit familiar at St. Mary’s. As a mother of two sons, my wife understands that religion is a wonderful tempering agent for young men. Young men get the message best through good role models. Boost the number of good role models, and you improve the odds.

I have a slightly different take on this formula for success, although it doesn’t matter. My hunch is that men are more than happy to let women run things if they want. We are perfectly comfortable in our dark caves watching sports. It’s just not quite as healthy of a blueprint for young men to follow.

The reason we only whisper about the complexity of this issue is because society has unanimously adopted a simple paradigm on most gender issues: Patriarchies oppressed the people of the world for centuries. Gender equity is a healthier vehicle for governing.

A smaller, more virulent voice on the left also appears determined to hold all men accountable for centuries of patriarchal oppression. The Catholic Church is a favorite target of this anger. It is perhaps the one religion that you can say almost anything about without political repercussions.

But that anger should not cloud our ability to see that something is happening to our sons. Newsweek devoted a cover story on this important issue in January 2006. Here is what it reported in the setup paragraph of that piece:

By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn’t like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they’re a minority at 44 percent. This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. Secretary of Education, “has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy.”

Oh, and our prisons are filling with young men like never before in history. Profound, indeed. Scolding the Catholics is easy. We have been desensitized to that. It is great sport to make fun of any institution that takes itself so seriously that it won’t let a woman referee a kid’s game. But then, making fun of something is an effective way to limit debate.

Siccing the government after St. Mary’s would be simple. Once the federal government figured out how to use interstate commerce to put the hammer on states, it knows no limits to its power.

Yet, I would hope that we can agree that something is happening to our young men that brings out the bad in too many of them. Maybe it is the lack of good role models. St. Mary’s is at least trying to find a better model for its young men.

In a nation built on the foundation of religious freedom, we should be able to conduct a healthy debate on such an important topic without beating it down with worn salvos from the past.

Mark Sheehan’s columns run on Wednesdays and Sundays.