My last conversation about the F-word was with a recently retired NFL player who might one day go into the Hall of Fame. By the end of our chat, we were screaming at one another.
He had used the F-word -- you know which word I mean, the derogatory one used to describe gays -- several times during a talk we were having about the NFL's toughest players. The player, who is African-American, called one of my player suggestions a f-----. He used the word repeatedly.
"A black man should never use that word," I said. "We should know better. It's the moral equivalent of the N-word."
"It's not the same," he said.
"The F-word and the N-word are exactly the same," I responded.
"Not even close."
"Tell me how it's different."
He couldn't, and our conversation ended with him calling me a dumbass. He's right. I normally am a dumbass. Just not about this.
That word, like in so many other sports, is used constantly in NFL locker rooms. Homophobia is a disease that has long gone viral in the NFL and across the sports world, the Andromeda Strain of slurs. The F-word is used so much in football and other leagues its true power and ugliness has been lost.
But there's a more disturbing problem: the use of the F-word by African-American male athletes.
Look at the two most recent high-profile cases involving slurs against gays. Kobe Bryant, who is African-American, and Joakim Noah, who is biracial (his father is a famous tennis player of African descent and his mother white) were both fined by the NBA for using the F-word. There was Kevin Garnett a few years ago and the remarks of Tim Hardaway. Kenyon Martin was caught on video screaming at Mark Cuban and calling Cuban a "fa---- mother------."
During an NFL season, players have told me over the years, the word is used hundreds of times in individual locker rooms, many times by African-Americans.
That word is the same as the N-word. Yes, it is. Don't look at me like that. Yes. It. Is.
This won't be a popular stance among some of my African-American football acquaintances, but it's a truthful one and it's a conversation that needs to be had.
When black men degrade gays, we are hypocrites. We cheapen our own history and struggles. It remains stunning to me why more African-American athletes (not all by any stretch but enough) don't understand this.
When a slur is aimed at us, we feel the impact. So why wouldn't gays?
There's no question the N-word has deeper historical context and is among the ugliest ever used (and I don't care what some rappers say). Because the F-word hasn't been utilized as a weapon as long as the N-word isn't justification for its use.
"I find it sad and ironic that athletes from a group long oppressed by language and the power of certain slurs would easily toss them around about another group," said Jim Buzinski, who runs Outsports.com, a site dedicated to the coverage of gay athletes. "There will be people who will argue there are historical differences, and while true, does not somehow make one slur 'more acceptable' than another. Hateful words are hateful words, period."
"Professional sports seems to be the last bastion of homophobia in this country; Kobe Bryant's antigay slur is just the tip of the iceberg," Robert Volk, professor at Boston University's School of Law with expertise in area of the law and sexual minorities, told the Christian Science Monitor. "A number of professional athletes that came out after they left their sport commented on the impossibility of coming out while a professional athlete, given the extremely homophobic atmosphere, and Bryant's fine is not enough to change the atmosphere."
Athletes who use the F-word aren't alone in their bigotry. Recent polls have shown only half of Americans find being gay morally acceptable. Marriage between gays is illegal in most states ... the way interracial marriage once was. Many parts of this country, unfortunately and disgracefully, truly despise gays.
Instead of helping to alleviate the experience of gays being the last acceptable group to bash, some athletes are aiding in the ostracizing, and too many of these athletes are African-American.
And I love this justification from some athletes post-gay slur: it was made in the heat of the game. Sure. If a white NFL player yelled the N-word during a game and later said it was only because he was in the heat of battle, that would be OK?
Gay slurs also aren't the same as saying a curse. Someone saying ass---- isn't the equivalent of the F-word. Ass----s aren't a group of people. Well, OK, in some cases they are, but you get me.
Do you know when homophobia in sports will stop? It will end when athletes see gays as human beings like them, just as large swaths of discrimination against African-American athletes stopped (though certainly not all) when whites saw blacks the same way.
They are the moral equivalent. They always will be.
For the last few decades, social conservatives and religious leaders have held to the opinion that being gay is a choice. It has boggled my mind that anyone could really believe this idea and I have tried to think of some reason why they would still, even after all this time, try to peddle this schlock. Some time ago, a possible explanation came to me. So, here is my theory...In the end, CPAC chair Alberto Cardenas indicated GOProud likely won’t be invited back, bowing to conservative groups like the Family Research Council, which, along with other groups, boycotted CPAC.
“They used that platform to be quite aggressive,” Cardenas told conservative publication Human Events of GOProud. “The ideal GOProud participation would have been, ‘You know what, guys? This is an inclusive society. We’re as interested in these fiscal issues as you are. Fill your website with fiscal issues that you’re for and be a mainstream discusser of issues. We just happen to have a different lifestyle.’ ” In other words, sit down, shut up, and don’t challenge homophobia.
And that’s what GOProud’s drama tells us about the endurance of the Christian right: It still wields a great deal of power in the GOP (witness how abortion became front and center in the budget battle), even as mainstream America is well beyond its issues.
The media claimed that the Tea Party was something new, focused on fiscal issues, not social ones, and had supplanted the religious right. But in fact, what we’ve come to learn is that it is often the same old crowd, and many of the Tea Party activists are also moral crusaders. That was borne out in the campaigns by two of the most prominent Tea Party Senate candidates in 2010, Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell.
GOProud is useful to the GOP insofar as it provides the cover of being “tolerant” of gays at a time when a majority of Americans now support marriage equality, and as younger voters support full equality in huge numbers. But Cardenas’s statement shows the limit of that tolerance. Those who control the GOP don’t want to see open gays in the party at all — even if they’re only supporting “fiscal” reforms.
That makes LGBT rights a wedge issue for Democrats to now wield against Republicans instead of the other way around, as it had been for so long. When President Obama decided not to defend DOMA, it was good for the LGBT movement but also great politics for him, something we all hope he and Democratic leaders have realized. It put the GOP on the defensive, as John Boehner showed no passion in defending DOMA — and knows most Americans don’t support DOMA — but had no choice because of that antigay base, which GOProud’s wild ride underscores is still very much in charge. ✤
GOProud is opposed to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which is now law. And fearing being cut out of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference - which for 2012 has banned groups that support any pro-gay legislation - Barron told the blog RedState last February, "Considering we don't support gay marriage and DADT isn't part of our agenda [I'm] not sure how this affects us at all."
Barron and GOProud now also support House speaker John Boehner defending section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in federal appeals court after President Obama announced he believed the law is unconstitutional — though Barron himself is legally married to a man in Washington, D.C. Barron’s husband, to whom he refers a lot in his tweets, is a D.C. teacher who wrote a piece in MetroWeekly about how kids learn to be bullies from adults who bully one another. But there couldn’t possibly be a better example of an adult bullying other adults than Barron tweeting this: “The gay left = the American Taliban. Hateful, angry and dumb as shit.” He’s also tweeted that Andrew Sullivan is “fat,” “pathetic,” and “self-important” and that Meghan McCain is “intensely stupid.”
Barron has said in a radio interview that he wanted to see as many candidates as possible in the Republican primaries — including, presumably, even the antigay ones, which is most of them — but then tweeted that Fred Karger, the only openly gay announced candidate (who is associated with GOProud’s rival group, Log Cabin, and actually forcefully takes on homophobic politicians), is a “fake candidate.”
Barron’s impulsive tweets are telling in a variety of ways. He obsessively tweets about his abs and his workouts in a way that betrays a guy who’s pretty insecure about his body and perhaps his very manhood, out to prove he’s a real guy, not like those other gays, such as the “catty” Barney Frank, who Barron tweeted has a “purse” and wants to “sit in Scott Brown’s lap.”
This insecurity over masculinity seems to be a theme at GOProud. In a YouTube clip that received much attention over the winter, GOProud member Matt Hissey says he doesn’t like most gays: “I don’t really like gay people that much. Gay people frustrate me, the stereotypical gay people, it frustrates me…”
In an interview on my radio program, Barron had a meltdown after I noted blatant hypocrisy in his apologizing for having rightly called conservative power attorney Cleta Mitchell a “nasty bigot” in a public forum. Conservatives at CPAC and across the right-wing blogosphere expressed outrage at his comment, and conservative lesbian radio host Tammy Bruce quit the GOProud board within days. GOProud’s invitation back to CPAC was jeopardized as well, in yet another example of Barron’s volatile nature getting him in trouble. Attempting to stop the bleeding, he issued a slobbering apology for his bad “language.”
When I noted that it was “wussy” of him to apologize to Mitchell while refusing to apologize for calling the gay left “dumb as shit,” Barron lashed out, and I had to bring the interview to a close.
Lessons Learned
COMMENTARY: Two notable themes emerge from GOProud: the lack of any actual gay pride in those who run it and the truth about who is still really steering the GOP.
There are two things we’ve learned from GOProud, the small, often obnoxious right-wing gay group that makes the Log Cabin Republicans seem like liberals. For the uninitiated, this is the group that supports outspokenly anti-equality public figures — from Ann Coulter, who was paid to speak to the group, to Donald Trump, who is opposed to any gay unions—and targeted gay congressman Barney Frank during the 2010 election with an ad that called him “catty.”
First off, denialists and elitists who believe they are superior to other gays — even if the attitude masks a pitiful self-loathing — are clearly as prevalent as ever in the LGBT movement, except that they can now be out of the closet. Perversely, the fact that we can find such people in GOProud is a measure of our success.
The other thing we’ve learned is that the Christian right, contrary to all the media blather about it losing steam as the Tea Party ascends, still has a grip on the GOP, and this can actually be helpful in gaining civil rights through the Democratic Party—if the Democrats recognize a useful wedge issue staring them in the face.
On the first count, let’s look back in history. There’ve always been gays in even the most extreme corners of the Republican Party. There was the reckless senator Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn, who helped his boss ferret out both alleged communists and homosexuals in the government in the 1950s. In the ’80s closeted conservative activist Terry Dolan vocally supported the antigay agenda of Christian right leaders as chair of the National Conservative Political Action Committee. He helped elect—and wrote a book about—Ronald Reagan, who bowed to religious extremists and ignored AIDS, the disease that took Dolan’s life in 1986 at the age of 35.
Justin Raimondo was the openly gay campaign manager of the virulently antigay Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign. In the new century we had Ken Mehlman, chair of the Republican National Committee and, later, George W. Bush’s reelection campaign manager, who promoted anti–gay marriage amendments across the country, helping the GOP to win with hate. And let’s not forget Mary Cheney, who, like Mehlman now, is out, but gives money to antigay politicians even as she enjoys the benefits of hard-won gay rights advances.
Their motivations are probably unique to each but there are some commonalities: a desire to be close to power; a hunger for attention and GOP approval; a selfish devotion to Republican “fiscal” policies over civil rights; and a belligerence toward gay activists, whom they seem to detest.
GOProud’s Chris Barron fits right in, often appearing desperate for Republican acceptance, compromising his positions at a moment’s notice—if he even had any to begin with. Formerly political director for the Log Cabin Republicans, he broke away and cofounded GOProud, claiming that Log Cabin wasn’t conservative enough. Since its founding in 2009, GOProud slowly moved in the direction of not taking any pro-gay positions, all in an attempt to be included in the Republican Party, even though Barron oddly once tweeted that GOProud is “a gay organization, we only work on gay issues.”
Here is an article from HRC:By: Charlie Joughin
Republicans in the Minnesota Senate are reportedly blocking emails from constituents expressing their anger and disappointment following a move by the legislature to place an anti-marriage amendment on the 2012 ballot.
According to MN Public Radio, Sen. Scott Dibble says more than 100,000 emails were set to be deleted this morning, claiming they were clogging the servers.
HRC sent an action alert to its entire list of members and supporters in the state on Sunday asking them to send a message of anger and disappointment to those legislators who voted in favor of the measure. The Secretary of the Senate is reporting that some 230,000 messages have been received since yesterday.
We have been working closely with OutFront Minnesota, Project 515, supportive legislators, labor and other progressive organizations in the state to oppose this measure in the legislature. Together, the group has been planning a winning campaign to defeat this amendment with the newly formed coalition, Minnesotans United for All Families – www.minnesotansunitedforallfamilies.org.
Currently, 29 states have constitutional amendments prohibiting marriage for same-sex couples. However, a recent Star-Tribune poll showed the majority of Minnesota residents oppose the amendment.
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| Jim Daly |
We're losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don't know if that's going to change with a little more age—demographers would say probably not. We've probably lost that. I don't want to be extremist here, but I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture.All of us have seen that the tide is turning against the haters when it comes to LGBT rights in general. It is why DADT is on its way out the door within the year. It's why there ARE states in which performance/recognition of same-sex marriages exists. It is why several polls are, for the first time in history, saying that a majority of Americans are for marriage equality. If people like Jim Daly, Bryan Fisher, and Tony Perkins wish to fight the long defeat, they are certainly free to do so. They MUST realize that history will not look kindly on them. They will be the George Wallace's of their generation.
"These people need to buy a Bible — and read it.
The professing Christian who practices yoga as a way to keep fit should heed the words of Mohler and Groothuis who both agree that yoga, even if it's labeled Christian, is diametrically opposed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Many Christians practice yoga for "relaxation and exercise" without realizing that classical yoga is intended to put you into an altered state of consciousness. Yoga is not "just exercising." Participants are being swept into a counterfeit religion. According to God's Word, pagan religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, are evil. The Bible clearly says that God's people are to have nothing to do with wicked customs. (Deuteronomy 18:9-14) Believers are instructed to, "Hate what is evil; cling to what is good." (Romans 12:90) Ever noticed how professing Christians are no longer uncomfortable in the face of evil? The reason is that we have been desensitized!
Sadly, Christians have become worldly. Instead of being beacons of light in a dark world we have become world-minded. In fact, we have blended into the dishonest, destructive and debase culture so thoroughly that it's near impossible to tell the difference between Christians and heathens!"
Minnesota already has a law against same-sex marriage on the books statutorily. Despite this, GOP legislators have put forth a constitutional ban on SSM which has already passed the State Senate (and will likely pass the house, both chambers are controlled by Republicans). The idea behind a constitutional ban being to preclude any judicial rulings in favour of having/recognizing same-sex marriages. None of this is a surprise. | |
| Don Lemon |
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| Rick Welts |
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| Daniel O'Donnell |
