Remember the old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me”? It’s meaningless now.[...]
Blowhard Mike Lupica wrote a piece entitled, “The only thing worth hearing from Tony Dungy is an apology to Michael Sam,” in which he wrote, “Whatever Dungy says about Sam and a controversy that he created, it is impossible to evaluate why he wouldn’t have wanted Sam on a football team he was coaching without putting all of this into the context of Dungy’s religious beliefs. That means his interpretation of the Bible, and an opposition to same-sex marriage that he’s decided is God’s will, as do all the other people who are as intolerant about the rights of gays as Dungy clearly is.”
It doesn’t read much different in its original German…
Lupica, and the rest of the self-important media, need to paint Dungy as a bigot because the alternative would be to acknowledge their role in creating the template that made every other team, to one degree or another, pass on drafting Sam when they had several chances to do so.
They hurt Michael Sam’s stock as a potential professional football player by elevating what isn’t an accomplishment (being gay) above Michael Sam as a player and a man. All Dungy did was point it out, and that is a curtain the progressive media cannot allow to be pulled back because it would be the end of them.
Josh Barro, juicebox journalist for the New York Times, tweeted this week, “Anti-LGBT attitudes are terrible for people in all sorts of communities. They linger and oppress, and we need to stamp them out, ruthlessly.” He wasn’t calling for people to be rounded up and placed in camps…yet. But he did follow up with, “We don't even need to change everybody's mind. Making people too embarrassed to express their anti-gay views is valuable progress.”
Right now, Barro seeks to silence any views that don’t fully embrace the “gay agenda.” But a major part of the progressive agenda is to silence all contrary opinions.
Global warming, health care, immigration reform, regulations, taxes, spending … you name it. Progressives label anyone who strays from their purity plantation as some sort of pejorative – a monster, an “other.” At this point there’s scarcely an American left progressives haven’t labeled some sort of “ist” of “phobe.”What’s being lost in all of this is the individual. Michael Sam may end up being a great pro football player, and he may not even make the team. But whatever happens to him, thanks to the progressive media, he will not be judged by the same standards everyone else has been judged. He’s not just Michael Sam, he’s something more. But really he is just Michael Sam.
Most of us don’t care that Michael Sam is gay. We care whether he can play football. If not for the media hype, which he somewhat brought on himself, Sam would have something approximating a normal NFL experience. He’d make or not make the team. He’s start or not start. He’d play a lot or very little. But it would be based on his abilities as a player. In fact, it will be. No NFL coach is going to keep him on the roster to keep up appearances. What happens then? How much second-guessing of the coach goes on then?This is what Tony Dungy, who is one of the most decent, respected people in sports, was talking about. It should be irrelevant, from a football sense, whether Sam is gay. He’s already accomplished a lot. He played on a division-winning team at Missouri, he was the SEC’s defensive player of the year, and he got drafted. Why can’t that be what we talk about when we discuss Michael Sam? Because Sam, the media and progressive America won’t let us.
This isn’t 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. Nobody is taking to the streets or wanting Sam run out of town. At this point, his coming out elicits a collective yawn, if that. But progressives won’t let him rise or fall on his own as a football player. They won’t let us truly move past discrimination and let Michael Sam be judged on the same things all other players are. They need to divide and conquer. Football teams can’t have that level of distraction and succceed. That’s all Dungy was saying.
By separating Sam the football player from Sam the man, progressives have created the very spectacle Dungy was talking about. And has been said before, you will be made to care, or be stamped out…ruthlessly.
http://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2014/07/27/sticks-stones-and-thought-crimes-n1868462/page/full
