Posts Tagged ‘homosexuality’
I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.
I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn’t the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, “I’m different.” If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I’m raising my hand.
My journey of self-discovery and self-acknowledgement began in my hometown of Los Angeles and has taken me through two state high school championships, the NCAA Final Four and the Elite Eight, and nine playoffs in 12 NBA seasons.
I’ve played for six pro teams and have appeared in two NBA Finals. Ever heard of a parlor game called Three Degrees of Jason Collins? If you’re in the league, and I haven’t been your teammate, I surely have been one of your teammates’ teammates. Or one of your teammates’ teammates’ teammates.
source: Sports Illustrated
If they had been the ones who made the choice, the gay community could not have picked a better man to be the first openly gay athlete in American big league sports. Seriously, how eloquent is this guy? Please do click the link and keep reading. It’s a great read. For all Jason Collins gifts as an athlete, the man is equally gifted with words.
Depending on where you mark the beginnings, Major League Baseball has been around for about 140 years, the NFL is seven years shy of 100, and the NBA will turn 67 in June. Through those three leagues and hundreds of years combined, no active player has come out until now. That is how hard the unwritten code of the locker room was cast. They may as well just have had a sign over the door of the locker room of every sports team in America that read, “NO GAYS ALLOWED.”
Jason Collins just showed a lot of courage to come out the way he did today. We’re not talking courage on the level of Jackie Robinson, Collins won’t face a level of hate anything near what Robinson faced in being the first black man to play in the major leagues, but as far as heroes and heroines go, in one day, I would say the man is already of a larger magnitude than say, Ellen DeGeneres, who came out in a comedian / entertainment community which already had it’s fair share of openly gay performers. This is not to take away anything from Ellen (whose act is surprisingly about as clean as Bob Sagat spinning jokes on America’s Funniest Home Videos) but beloved as Ellen may be by the gay community and supporters of gay rights, what Jason Collins did today was a giant leap forward compared to Ellen’s step out of the closet.
Myself personally? I’m so straight, I once french kissed a guy on a bet and felt even more straight after that kiss because I felt nothing whatsoever in it. I only have eyes for women and nothing but women. I also have a lot of Christian friends who I respect who truly believe that homosexuality is a sin. I will continue respecting them as long as they also live up to Jesus’ teaching to “hate the sin, love the sinner”.
That is their belief, they think homosexuality is a choice and a sinful one at that, and I will respect my Christian friends who believe this even though I have seen with my own eyes plenty examples of people who I believe were born gay. Sure, some people might make the choice as a conscious decision, a choice that they would rather live the alternative lifestyle, but who among us hasn’t also known a two- or three- or four-year-old kid that you already knew was gay many years before they might figure it out themselves?
There are conservatives and there are libertarians. I am much more the latter than the former, but for my conservative friends who believe in “traditional marriage”, I ask you to try to imagine being born different as I give some major props to Jason Collins, because today, he became the first major leaguer to have the courage to come out and say, this is me, and I am who I am.
Csanad Looks Like Such a Pleasant Guy in the Photos
Csanad Szegedi was notorious for his incendiary comments on Jews: He accused them of “buying up” the country, railed about the “Jewishness” of the political elite and claimed Jews were desecrating national symbols.
Then came a revelation that knocked him off his perch as ultra-nationalist standard-bearer: Szegedi himself is a Jew.
Following weeks of Internet rumors, Szegedi acknowledged in June that his grandparents on his mother’s side were Jews — making him one too under Jewish law, even though he doesn’t practice the faith. His grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor and his grandfather a veteran of forced labor camps.
source: NY Daily News
Now there’s a feel good story. This guy was out there on the radical fringe spewing hate against Jews and then it turns out he’s a Jew himself! Now not only does the rest of society not want anything to do with him and his brand of hate, but now his own hate-spewing comrades (make that former comrades) hate his ass even more than the rest of us!
Funny, but not too surprising considering history’s most evil anti-Semite of all, Adolph Hitler, was so concerned of his murky lineage and unknown paternal grandfather that he had a Nazi law written defining Jewishness to exclude Jesus Christ and himself. (Talk about trying to cover his own ass.) Whether or not he was Jewish he probably never knew and the world at large will probably never know, but there was a case of a man consumed with self-doubt and self-hate.
Shifting from Jew-haters to gay-bashers, I have a theory that a man’s heterosexuality is inversely proportional to his level of homophobia, the more hetero a man is, the less he worries over the “problem” of gay people, the more homophobic a man is, the more he’s actually trying really hard to bury his own homosexual tendencies. Those people that go looking to bash gays? Biggest queers on the face of the earth, they’re just in complete denial over their own feelings.
Political Rehab, Day 14: Well, the blog has remained politics free, although probably should consider a couple political posts on Facebook as some sort of relapse. Not only that, but where the challenge was 30 political-free posts in 30 days, I’ve only managed 5 in 14. Yikes, it is harder than I thought switching gears.
Sad news regarding one of my favorite lunatics in baseball:
LUTZ, Fla. — Former major league outfielder Carl Everett was in a Tampa jail Tuesday on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after putting a handgun to his wife’s head, according to police records. Everett, 39, was arrested Monday night at his home in the Tampa suburb of Lutz. He was also charged with tampering with a witness and was being held in the Hillsborough County Jail.
source: ESPN
That is such a bummer to hear, I always loved the fact that Carl Everett was maybe the most outspoken player of recent memory. I did not dig the fact that his views on homosexuality are about 100 or 200 years behind the times, and I’m sure many gays out there are probably smiling at the news today, but if true tolerance is a wide acceptance of lifestyles and beliefs, how can I be tolerant of gays and not also hold some tolerance for those Christians and Muslims whose convictions lead them to believe homosexuality is a sin with no hate in their hearts.
So I tried to look past his views on homosexuality and just marvel at a guy who may have been the farthest “out-there” baseball player of recent memory. “C-Rex” was a man who stood by his convictions, whacky as some of them were. Witness the following:
Carl Everett is a man of conviction. As an Apostolic Christian, he believes that the Bible, interpreted literally, is the infallible authority on all matters. As the cocksure centerfielder for the Boston Red Sox he believes in taking on pitchers and questions alike with the same absolute assuredness. The man plays and talks with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Just ask.
Interleague play? “Don’t like it,” Everett responds. “They only have it because of two teams [the New York Mets and the New York Yankees]. It’s all about the money.” Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter? “Not a star.” The Mets, one of his former teams? “All those [management] people are hypocrites and idiots.” The Atlanta Braves’ starting pitchers? “You can run on them all day.” Big cities? “Hate ‘em. I need space.” American League baseball? “Boring.” Dinosaurs? “Didn’t exist.”
Uh, come again?
“God created the sun, the stars, the heavens and the earth, and then made Adam and Eve,” Everett said last Friday, before the Red Sox lost two of three in Atlanta. “The Bible never says anything about dinosaurs. You can’t say there were dinosaurs when you never saw them. Someone actually saw Adam and Eve. No one ever saw a Tyrannosaurus rex.”
What about dinosaur bones?
“Made by man,” he says.
Everett has trouble, too, with the idea of man actually walking on the moon. After first rejecting the notion, he concedes, “Yeah, that could have happened. It’s possible. That is something you could prove. You can’t prove dinosaurs ever existed. I feel it’s far-fetched.”
source: Sports Illustrated
That is one of my all time favorite sports articles, the whole article is just priceless and well worth the read, as much as for some of the quotes his teammates make about Carl as for some of the other blasts he gets off.
Hope very much for healing for the whole Everett family.