Last week USA Today wrote about the growing popularity of flag football for girls in high schools, especially in Florida, where it is a state championship sport.

Flag football also has been introduced at the varsity level in Washington, D.C., and is growing as a club sport in parts of Texas.

More girls coming out to play sports — this is a good thing, no?

No, if you’re an official mouthpiece for a leading women’s organization. Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel, National Women’s Law Center:

“You can add sports as recreational or intramural — it’s great to have activities to help girls be physically active. If you’re going to add a varsity sport, it is relevant if that sport is going to provide the same opportunities as the boys have. So, to then add flag football as opposed to a sport, like volleyball or soccer, that does allow girls to get college scholarships is not equitable.”

Nancy Hogshead-Makar, director of advocacy for the Women’s Sports Foundation, echoes Chaudhry:

“The thing that makes sports valuable is having a goal and postponing the short-term. If you want to have fun, you don’t train for the Olympics. What purpose would anybody have to swim four hours a day if they didn’t have a long-term goal?”

Hold on now. I’ve never seen anywhere in my reading of Title IX a stipulation about high school sports being added to accommodate athletic scholarships at the college level. Just because flag football doesn’t translate doesn’t mean it should be nixed from consideration in high schools for Title IX purposes.

On the other hand, women’s sports activists have endorsed the addition of college sports for women — such as rugby and bowling — that have little to no interest or organization at the high school level, just to meet Title IX demands.

Both of these women are lawyers, and I’ve heard them and others like them say often that the law is meant simply to give females an opportunity to play. It says nothing at all about whether such activity is required to be a gateway to a college scholarship.

The reaction of these activists smacks of the fight over varsity cheerleading at Quinnipiac University. A federal judge ruled in 2010 that it wasn’t a sport for Title IX purposes, satisfying the urgings of women’s sports activists when the Connecticut school dropped its women’s volleyball program.

The latest crusade from the NWLC is to go after school districts that aren’t doing right by Title IX, and here are some school districts that are trying to address those disparities. We have two activities here, in cheerleading and flag football, that are generating some considerable interest from young females, and the activists are resisting this.

Is it because these sports are considered just a bit too traditionally feminine?

The producers of the Title IX documentary “In the Game” Tweeted a link to this ESPN story over the weekend about the paucity of women in action sports. The headline, “Gender Gap,” sums up so much of the wrong-headed approach to gauging the progress of women in sports, especially in the mainstream media. Says writer Matt Higgins:

“According to Marie Case, managing director of Board-Trac, an action sports market research company, in 2010 there were about 18 million participants in the U.S. across skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing, 25 percent of whom were women. Of approximately 2.6 million surfers, 31.8 percent were female; of 6.7 million snowboarders, 24.2 percent were female; and of 8 million skaters, only 12.6 percent were female.

And then there’s this:

“Title IX, a law dating to 1972 that bars discrimination among programs that receive federal funding, has meant more opportunities for girls to play sports in school. But with action sports typically outside the scope of public schools and universities, opportunities for females are largely governed by the rules of the marketplace.”

Of course I wish there were more women in sports, politics, technology and international finance, for much more than the sake of representation. Our games, laws, gadgets and economy would be a hell of a lot better, fairer, easier to use and more inclusive than they are now.

But we’re so busy counting up numbers and determining percentages even in relatively new sports involving a post-Title IX generation of women and where gender equity laws do not apply that we overlook another major factor that is mentioned nowhere in this story.

Choice.

That’s always been an important word for establishment feminists when it comes to a woman’s right to control her own body, a concept with which I strongly agree. But they never seem to consider it when it comes to examining why women don’t do certain things in greater numbers.

They may not want to.

Consider the example of competitive cheerleading, which is producing a bit of a split among women’s sports advocates and that The New York Times examined earlier this week in its continuing “Gender Games” series. Says Nancy Hogshead-Makar of the Women’s Sports Foundation:

“As long as it’s actually operating as a sport, we welcome it into the women’s sports tent.”

Which sounds fair enough. Then there’s former college basketball player Barbara Osborne, whom were told now advises college athletic departments as an “expert” on gender equity:

“What we consider sports are things that men have traditionally played.”

To be fair, Osborne said she wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea of counting cheerleading as a legitimate sport, but there remains quite a bit of reluctance.

Both women are quite eager to declare themselves authorities on what other women ought to aspire to athletically. Both could be more tolerant toward the individual courses that women are choosing for their lives thanks to Title IX. It’s a good law that needs to be kept on the books.

But Hogshead-Makar’s organization has been a stingy gatekeeper of a “women’s sports tent” that isn’t as expansive as it might be. And Osborne’s comment gives away the primary conceit of the gender equity establishment: That male-dominated fields should be the Promised Land for women to satisfy their ambitions, whether it’s sports or other educational or professional areas.

Cheerleading is such a hot topic because of the unending numbers game college athletic departments have to play in order to keep Title IX litigants at bay. As are the so-called “emerging sports” the NCAA suggests schools consider adding to get to proportionality but that don’t generate much interest from actual female athletes. Sand volleyball received a last-minute reprieve from being dropped from the NCAA list last year, but squash will soon get the axe. In August, the list will be down to just three sports — equestrian, rugby and sand volleyball.

(And I’m not the only female sportswriter who’s had a change of mind about cheerleading.)

The presumption that women would naturally be flocking to sports in the same numbers as men if only the “opportunities” were there is undercut by the first story in the Times series that revealed how men are counted as women in order to get the numbers right.

This desperation will continue as long as Title IX sports compliance remains tethered to a set of numbers that made sense 30 years ago, when women were in distinct minorities as students and athletes. That is no longer the case, as women are dominating undergraduate enrollment and even at big football schools are approaching or surpassing 50 percent of the athletes.

Here’s a better baseline for not only reworking the Title IX regulations but also rethinking what we mean by gender equity:

Celebrate the women who do choose to participate in sports and make it a big part of their lives, but respect and honor the choices of women who do not.

Never mind the gender gap. It’s not the truest measure of equality, but rather the most simplistic way of comparing men and women with the effect of perpetually dividing them.

• I’ve spent some fascinating hours researching the status of women’s sports around the world, and it certainly puts into a more realistic perspective the recent skirmishes over Title IX that I’ve been blogging about here and elsewhere. Since no other country has a law mandating sports offerings as Title IX does in the United States, activists, athletes and organizations pushing for greater athletic opportunities for females have to work in very different ways, and with varying objectives.

It’s been just a decade or two, in fact, since the International Olympic Committee, FIFA, FIBA and even the United Nations began addressing global disparities in sports for women and getting themselves organized to play significant roles in this process.

Meanwhile, the rah-rah over competitive cheerleading on the Fruited Plain continues . . .

• Women’s sportswriter Mechelle Voepel thinks on balance the Quinnipiac decision was a good one, but offers the closest thing to a voice of reason on that side of the ledger.

• Cheerleading advocates will keep fighting for inclusion although immediate prospects for the growth of their sport at the college level have been dented.

• Richard Epstein isn’t happy with the Quinnipiac ruling, and fulminates at Forbes:

“A totalitarian peace will rule the land.”

That’s a bit much, I think.

• At ESPN.com, Gregg Easterbrook nails exactly where I come down on this, and with a better sense of humor, likening Title IX to a Monty Python sketch. Easterbrook really spikes an ace here:

“Take a gander at that 95-page judicial ruling. There are excruciating details on whether the university sought enough guidance from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights before making a volleyball decision. Civil rights are serious, important national issues — whether a college offers volleyball or cheer is not a civil rights issue!

“There is no ‘civil right’ to be on a volleyball team! If you hope to continue to play women’s volleyball in college, it’s up to you to transfer to a college that offers the sport rather than run to the courthouse demanding special favoritism.”

About that Monty Python sketch: Is it the one about a dead parrot? Gotta read the full Monty to find out, folks.

• A point-counterpoint debate is underway at FanHouse, with Clay Travis professing that cheerleading is a sport, and David Whitley arguing to the contrary. That headline, however, will not please the activists one bit.

• Allison Kasic at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum gives some props to yours truly and this non-doctrinaire liberal does appreciate it.

In all of my musings here, it’s never been about taking sides or choosing one raging argument over the other.

The Quinnipiac case angered me because both the school and the activists showed their backsides in rather unbecoming ways. I gave the Title IX diehards the worst of it because they have taken it upon themselves to determine what’s best for women in sports, and will engage in no small amount of legal expense and self-aggrandizing publicity to get their way. Flag football is another sport the activists are trying to nip in the bud, so don’t be surprised to see that as battleground fare in the near future.

I was never enamored with cheerleading, especially as a young tomboy who despised all forms of girly-girly behavior. They were the snotty, popular girls in school, with their bouncy long hair and cute boyfriends, but I felt superior thinking they were merely decorative. They were on the sidelines; I was in the game.

Then I got over my own snottiness and realized it didn’t matter what I thought; girls have been flocking to cheerleading in even greater numbers since various competitions began cropping up over the last couple of decades. My now-adult female cousin cheered for her high school teams, and these girls took their routines and their tournaments as seriously as the athletes they were rooting on.

If girls and young women are expressing greater interest in these physical, competitive activities than supposed “real” sports, then these interests should be accommodated, not demeaned. Just like one of the tests for Title IX compliance.

The snotty girls are no longer the ones with the pom-poms, but those who have appointed themselves the arbiters of what girls should be doing. They remind me of the snotty, haughty playground schoolgirls who used to tell me to stop playing sports with the boys if I wanted to hang with them. It made my decision to bid adieu to that kind of cliquishness easy. Now the tables are turned with a new kind of groupthink, and it’s just as wrong to impose.

Totalitarian? Maybe. Bossy? Certainly.