Here’s a Mad Lib that should save sports journalists a lot of time in the years ahead.
You get the gist.
This post is not really about homosexuality. Of course, that’s the subtext: Michael Sam, a football standout at Mizzou and future NFL draft pick, came out of the closet over the weekend. I’m glad he was treated well by his coach and teammates. I hope he is treated with respect by future players, fans, and general managers. I’m not writing to bash a recent college student, as much as I disagree with his sexual choices (assuming he is a practicing gay man). I disagree with the sexual choices most professional athletes make.
The problem is that our ascendant moral logic amounts to an imposition: affirm me or else. It used to be that tolerance meant granting to your intellectual, political, or religious opponents the right to be wrong (as you see the wrong). Now tolerance means the freedom, if not the obligation, to utterly shame those you deem intolerant. Ours is a supremely moralistic age. I would call it puritanical, except I don’t want to insult the Puritans.
I heard Colin Cowherd (whom I often enjoy) say he was going to try not to be sarcastic in talking about those who don’t support gay rights, but it would be really hard. I heard him talk about how Sam would be accepted in the NFL because unlike in baseball, the players had been to college and have been educated to overcome such prejudices. Besides there aren’t as many Hispanics, who can be very religious. Sure, some players from the rural South would still hate on Sam, he opined, but the vast majority would not. Whenever the “first gay athlete” story breaks it becomes an excuse to strengthen a dozen prejudices in the interest of purportedly breaking through another. The narrative is nice and tidy because it’s already been written. Rinse, blather, repeat. All that’s left is for 72 hours of self-congratulatory punditry and the presumption that no thinking person can reach any other conclusion than that the celebration of sexual expression in virtually any permutation is the crowning achievement of all enlightened peoples.
There is no conversation any longer, just condescension. No acceptance of diverse viewpoints, just personal obliteration for anyone who dares to question Oceania’s Ministry of Truth. The talking heads and the purveyor’s of cultural correctness don’t feel the need to make arguments anymore. They don’t feel the need to listen either. After all, who can refute a sneer?
No need to prove your dogma when stigma will do.
