Topic: WorldNetDaily
Rita Dunaway spends her June 25 WorldNetDaily column defending soccer player Jaelene Hinkle, who declined a call-up to the U.S. national women's soccer team because she didn't want to wear a jersey marking LGBT pride. Dunaway huffed that "U.S. Soccer has employed its power instead to divide, exclude and discriminate" -- despite the fact that the governing body did nothing to discriminate against Hinkle. She explained her convoluted logic:
Hinkle is in good company. Most devout Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Mormons and Orthodox Jews would also feel constrained by their faith to express “gay pride.” So why would U.S. Soccer force players to wear the emblem of “gay pride” – a religiously divisive emblem – if its goal is to promote “acceptance and inclusion” of individuals “from all backgrounds”? Why not the emblem of a dove, for peace; a heart, for love; or the world, for global connectivity?
As it stands, U.S. Soccer’s chosen means to “promote a culture of diversity, inclusivity and global connectivity” actually excludes devout people of many different faiths from the national teams. That’s not diversity, sports fans.
This all tells us one of two things about U.S. Soccer; either its leaders have an anemic, laughably unsophisticated understanding of the world’s diverse cultures and religions, or they are dishonest bigots. Either way, whether intentional or not, U.S. Soccer is promoting the very type of exclusion it claims to oppose.
Dunaway didn't mention that Christians have promoted exclusion against the LGBT community for centuries.
Her obliviousness to anti-gay discrimination continued by declaring, "Bigotry is always wrong, regardless of its object. But taunting and jeering at a person who has walked away from a lifelong dream in order to honor her faith is worse than bigotry. It is cruel." But Hinkle was not discriminated against -- she chose to discriminate. Yet Dunaway is concerned only with the person who displayed bigotry, however benign, and not the group of people who have suffered a history of bigotry by the group to which Hinkle belongs.
