Wins Before Women?

As most of you know, I love sports.  I love watching sports, playing sports, going to sporting events.  I love rooting for my teams, win or lose, though I really love it when they win.  However, I also want my teams to win the RIGHT way; to win without breaking the rules or win without harboring a team full of thugs, criminals and miscreants.  I could be wrong, but I think most sports fans feel the same way: they’d rather have a moderately successful, upstanding program/team than one that wins while breaking rules or doing things the wrong way.  (Unless you’re a Patriots fan.  Apparently, it’s win at all costs, rules be damned with them.)

Sadly, far too often, teams are willing to accommodate all kinds of bad behavior in turn for positive results on the field.  How many times have we seen college teams recruit/coddle/shield kids who are thugs off the field because of their athletic prowess on the field?  How many times have we seen pro sports teams draft players with a checkered past because they can run like the wind, hit a baseball a mile or shoot the lights out with a basketball in their hands?  This sort of thing happens far too frequently.  And far too frequently, the offenses those athletes have committed involve violence against women.  How many times have we heard stories of athletes assaulting or raping or otherwise injuring their wife or girlfriend?  Whether it’s Lawrence Phillips at Nebraska, Dorial Green-Beckham at Mizzou, Ray Rice with the Baltimore Ravens, or the latest allegations that are coming out at Baylor, it’s a story that happens far too often.  In spite of their transgressions, many of these athletes escape harsh punishment because of their athletic prowess; because someone at the top of the food chain sees dollar signs and cares more about the money than about the lives of these women.

The frustrating thing is that, often, these athletes come with a checkered past.  Some of them have already shown a propensity for bad behavior before they ever set foot on campus or before they are ever drafted.  I’m sure that sometimes these coaches believe that those prior instances were anomalies, that people shouldn’t be punished forever for mistakes that they made when they were 18 or 19 years old.  Unfortunately, I believe they more often are willing to overlook those transgressions because they know the athletic talent these young men have and they realize that they can help them win football or basketball games.  With more wins comes more money – for the coach, for the athlete, for the university, for the pro sports team.

While I believe in second chances as much as the next person, the issue is that the schools/teams too often don’t appropriately punish/discipline the offending players even when they continue with their prior behavior of raping/assaulting women.  These players aren’t just given a second chance; they are given a second chance and a third chance and, sometimes, even more chances than that.  Their offenses and conduct are overlooked or downplayed not for altruistic reasons, but for selfish reasons.  Someone – the coach, athletic director, team owner, university president – has done a cost-benefit analysis and has somehow deemed that the benefit of that player’s athletic abilities outweigh the cost of protecting or employing a sex offender.  Someone has decided that the benefits of winning games outweigh the costs of battered women and ruined lives.

What message does that send to the women?  It tells them that their lives and their well-being, don’t matter.  Or, if they do matter, they matter less than their abuser’s ability to be a cash cow for a menagerie of power brokers.

What message does that send to the athletes?  It empowers them to think they are indestructible, that they can do whatever they want off the field or off the court as long as they keep producing on it.  Young men see that and think they can get away with it because so many others before them have done so.  It sets a dangerous precedent.

We need our coaches, our universities, our sports teams and our athletes to say enough is enough.  We need those power brokers to say “not on my watch,” that “the buck stops here.”  We need to them to say that it’s not okay, that it will not be tolerated.  However, we need them to do more than just say it.  It’s not enough to say “It’s on us.”  They need to prove that with their actions.  They need to stop recruiting, drafting, protecting and coddling these thugs and sex offenders.  Instead, they need to consider the character of the people they pick to represent their sports programs.  They need to kick these thugs off the team, kick them out of school, terminate their contracts and turn them over to the authorities.  If the powers that be can’t handle that, then they themselves should be fired.  Because that is the only way this is ever going to stop.  Because the old cliché is correct: talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words.  Because the lives and well-being of people are more important than the score on the scoreboard and the amount of money in the bank account.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

On Religious Liberty

One of the more frequent news topics lately has been the spate of so called “religious liberty” bills that are being proposed (and in some cases) passed in various state legislatures.  The primary supposed justification for these bills is to permit business owners to refuse to serve or accommodate same sex couples on grounds that they have a religious objection to the lifestyles of those said couples.  For instance, if a baker has religious beliefs that same sex marriage is forbidden by the Bible, he or she could refuse to bake a wedding cake for a same sex wedding and he or she couldn’t in turn be sued for discrimination for doing so.  Many of the legislators who are behind these “religious liberty” bills were the same folks who were behind constitutional amendments to ban same sex marriage just a few years ago.  Those laws and amendments have been deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.  So, since those legislators “lost” that battle, they are trying to fight it under the auspices of “religious liberty.”

Now, I’m all for freedom of religion, the freedom to worship or not worship how you choose.  It’s a constitutional right guaranteed by the First Amendment and was one of the principles upon which our nation was founded.  However, the Fourteenth Amendment also says “nor shall any State deprive any person of…liberty….nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  I realize that many conservatives dislike the Fourteenth Amendment, but just because they dislike it doesn’t mean they can ignore it.  It is a valid, ratified amendment to the Constitution just as much as the First Amendment or Second Amendment.  Regardless of your political persuasion – whether you are conservative or liberal or libertarian or somewhere in between – I think we can all agree that part of the point of the constitution is to grant us freedoms and rights and protect us from those who would do away with those rights.  As such, I think it is common sense to say that your First Amendment rights don’t trump someone else’s Fourteenth Amendment rights.

However, the “liberty” piece is only part of the equation.  The other part is the religion aspect.  Most of the time, it is Christians citing verses in the Bible that purport to speak out against homosexuality.  Some of those are in Leviticus and the Old Testament, while others are in Paul’s letters in the New Testament.  However, as Christians, we are called to follow Christ’s example.  So, what did Christ say about gays or gay marriage?  Not much.  True, there are some passages where He speaks of marriage in terms that would indicate only heterosexual marriage (Matthew 19:4-6), but He never expressly speaks out against homosexuality in the way that Paul does.  More importantly, it is important to look at how Jesus treated others during His ministry, even those who were deemed by others to be sinful.  Whether it’s the Samaritan woman at the well or the corrupt tax collectors, Jesus didn’t shun anyone.  He may not approve of their lifestyles, and in many cases instructed them to repent and change their ways, but He treated them with respect.  I believe that we are called to follow that example.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think that God is going to condemn a baker for baking a cake that happens to be for a same-sex wedding or a hotel owner who books a ballroom for a same-sex wedding reception.  Just because you provide a service to someone with whose lifestyle choices you disagree, that doesn’t mean you are condoning their lifestyle choices.  It simply means that you are doing your job and treating people fairly.  All of us have to do things in our jobs that we may not necessarily agree with but we must do as a part of being employed.  (I won’t even get into the topic of whether or not this is a “lifestyle choice” in the first place, as opposed to something determined by genetics.)

I believe that churches should be able to control who can and cannot participate in their various rites and sacraments – that the government shouldn’t intercede on that front.  But if you are a business owner who is in the business of serving the public, you should not be allowed to refuse service to someone because of their sexual orientation any more than you can their race, gender, religion, etc.  If you cannot abide by those standards, then you should pick a different profession.

Too often, the many good deeds and positive accomplishments of Christians are overshadowed by our missteps and I think this another example of this.  We are called to be the light of the world and to minister to others, but our efforts to do so are undermined when we are more focused on condemning the actions and choices of others than we are with spreading the Good News.

Fortunately, Missouri decided not to pass the religious liberty bill that was on the floor this spring.  Here’s hoping that the issue doesn’t get brought up again in future years and that other states follow suit.

Thanks for reading!