Cross-posted from State of Formation.

As you have almost certainly surmised if you read Dan Savage’s apology, it isn’t an apology for much. It’s more of a clarification– an explanation of 1) how the distinction between how you act (pansy-assedly) and who you are (a pansy-ass) matters, but not as much as we sometimes like to pretend, and 2) the presumably uncontroversial-to-anyone-but-bible-literalists-and-people-who-want-to-portray-LBGT-advocates-as-bullies point that noting the existence of non-truths in a holy text is absolutely not the same as insulting the minds and practices of everyone who treats that text as holy.

Call me biased, but I wouldn’t call Christianity “bullshit.” That’s because I know that Christianity is a lot more than a set of propositions that may or may not be true and practices that are demonstrably counter-productive– unlike, say, the so-called Law of Attraction. But if the Law of Attraction inspired the practice of charity, the creation of beautiful and enduring art and architecture, the gathering of families across the world in a single silent night of appreciating each other’s company, well…I wouldn’t call that bullshit either. I have a Tim-Minchin-like regard for the celebration of Christmas with one’s family, even if for us it almost never involves actually drinking white wine in the sun:

If that doesn’t get you at least a little bit misty, I suggest that you might be a cyborg. Best to get that checked out.

Christianity is an identity, for some people a highly consuming one. It’s kind of disconcerting to see atheists forget that, as if they have no recollection of why the process of deconversion was so arduous in the first place. Some of us took our faith very seriously, and it was that same seriousness that caused us to consider it and consider it and examine it closely with tweezers and microscopes and fine-toothed combs, and eventually after so much examination and analysis…cast it aside.

That’s why I can’t agree with commentaries like this one, and understand why Savage felt the need to elaborate on precisely what he was labeling “bullshit” and why. I still don’t think any apology was necessary, but it’s unfortunate to see so many complaints that the brush he was painting with just wasn’t broad enough.

From Skepchick, Guest Post: IGN Agrees, Women are Whores

Money quote:

There aren’t many words more denigrating to women than ‘whore’. It’s the one that summons mental images of domestic violence, of the worst sort of reduction to a sexual object. That Deadwood smack of ‘disposable, beatable hole’ makes me physically cringe. When I see ‘attention whore’, I grit my teeth, but plain old whore? You can’t call a woman much worse. So when is it appropriate to use it? I know! As a punchline in a parody video to replace a horse! You know that Old Spice commercial from a few years back that everyone had forgotten about by now? Ends with “I’m on a horse”. Ripe for parody! It works out beautifully because not only does ‘whore’ sound exactly like ‘horse’, but women and horses are roughly equal! Especially funny is getting the woman on all fours in a supplicant position and sitting on her like she’s your sex worker. Sorry, whore.

From Greta Christina’s Blog, “Feminists have made sex workers’ lives so much more difficult”: A Guest Post from Sarah van Brussel

Money quote:

During the conference I had the opportunity to talk to sex worker activists who work on human rights issues from all over the world. One thing I kept hearing over and over again was how feminists have made sex workers’ work so much more difficult. I usually wear my ‘feminist badge’ with pride, but this shocked and shamed me. An activists from the Turkish organisation Kadin Kapisi said that when she became a sex worker activist she expected to be fighting with fundamentalists, traditionalists, bigots and other conservative people, but instead she spends most of her time fighting feminists and socialists. An activist from the English Collective of Prostitutes said it even more succinctly: “we live in fear of raids and ‘rescue’”. The experience of speaking directly with sex workers has made me even more determined to be the best ally I can be. I know these activists women and men as incredibly passionate, smart and above all brave people, and it fills me with rage when people like Taslima Nasreen dismiss them as victims and deny them their agency. One of the highlights of the AWID Forum for me was the launch of the first fund led by and for sex workers, the Red Umbrella Fund (Mama Cash is administratively hosting the Fund). The mission of this new fund is to “strengthen and ensure the sustainability of the sex worker rights movement by catalyzing new funding specifically for sex worker-led organisations and national, regional and global networks.”

From Feministe, Why the Sex Positive Movement is Bad for Sex Workers

Money quote:

Emphasizing sex and pleasure harms the sex workers who aren’t firmly in the self-defined population of being sex positive and sexually educated, by unintentionally shaming them for not being enthusiastic participants in the sex they have at work. When engaging in the trade or sale of sex is helping an individual to meet their basic physiological needs, they often do not have the personal resources to channel energy into making the experience of transactional sex perfectly pleasurable for either themselves or their client. Not every sexual experience, whether paid or not, has to be perfectly erotic. This is an unreasonable expectation, and one that makes it more difficult for people who have negative experiences to speak openly about their truths with sex work or sexuality more generally. The “‘poor abused whores’ lobby” spews plenty of toxic garbage about the experiences of people coerced into the sex industry and their preferred (unattainable, abolitionist) solutions, often without letting people with those experiences speak for themselves. However, if feminist sex positive sex workers also silence these voices, we are not contributing as positively to the cause of sex workers’ rights as we want to believe. “Happy Hooker” vs “Exploited Victim”: Defeating the Dichotomy In the media trainings I do, I ask the participants to come up with a main message that, if they had two minutes, they want their audience to receive. They then need to back up this message with two or three talking points, one sentence statements that can be evidence-based, use logic or other rhetorical devices to give the audience a different perspective. Every time I have done the training, someone is eager to express the message that sex workers are average people with many dimensions: we are mothers, brothers, taxpayers, neighbors, pet enthusiasts, gourmet cooks, etc. Inevitably, one of the supporting talking points they come up with is, “You wouldn’t be able to distinguish me from anyone else you walk by; I’m not a street worker or a junkie.” But some sex workers – maybe not sex workers in your immediate circle – are street workers and junkies, and we cannot throw them under the bus as we have been doing. To define oneself as essentially normal, in opposition to drug-using, street based workers, is to imply that they are not as worthy as rights as those of us who fit better into society. Furthermore, when we define ourselves in opposition to what we view as negative portrayals of sex work, we silence people who have had these experiences, and we communicate to them that they are not welcome in our community.

From Greta Christina’s Blog (again), Sex Work and a Catch-22 

Money quote:

When I was writing yesterday’s post, asking current and former sex workers to talk about their experiences in the industry and describing my own, I stumbled across an interesting Catch-22… one that I realized makes it harder to talk about my experiences in the industry. This particular Catch-22 has to do with my motivations for getting into sex work: did I do it out of economic necessity, or for personal and sexual pleasure, or for some combination of the two?  The Catch-22 is this: If I say that I became a nude dancer primarily for the money, then I feed into the stereotype of sex workers as victims. I feed into the stereotype that nobody really wants to do sex work, that sex work is always horribly unpleasant at best and abusive or exploitative at worst, and that there is no reason anyone would ever do it other than coercion or desperation. But if I say that I became a nude dancer primarily for reasons other than money, I get targeted as a dilettante. My experiences in the business gets dismissed as trivial or fake, not the “real” experience of “real,” in-the-trenches sex workers. It’s basically a No True Scotsman fallacy. If you got into the business for any reason other than economic pressure, and/or if you enjoy working as a sex worker, then you’re not a “real” sex worker — since nobody could possibly enjoy anything about working as a sex worker. And if I didn’t feel great economic pressure to get into the business, and felt like I had other choices, then speaking about my own experiences is somehow seen as diminishing the experiences of people who did get into the business out of necessity. Plus, of course, if I say that sexual pleasure was my primary motivation for getting into the industry, or even a significant part of it, I get dismissed as a slut. The reality, for me, is that economic pressure and sexual pleasure were both motivating factors.

I really enjoy reading everything Greta Christina has to say on her blog. Sometimes I forget to check it, which is an oversight on my part, but every time I go and read through a new entry I feel edified by the experience. The same, sadly, cannot be said of the comment section. Which is not to disparage the comments– they are usually dominated by insightful additions or reflections on the original post by readers. It’s just that the more seemingly obvious the point Greta Christina makes, the more inevitable it is that someone will show up in the comments who missed that point entirely, and wants to use the opportunity to lecture her on how wrong-headed she is.

Exhibit A: Fashion Friday: Atheist T-Shirts in Women’s Styles.

Obvious, Seemingly Non-Controversial Thesis: When skeptical/atheist organizations have a conference, it sure would be nice if they offered t-shirts which come in women’s sizes in addition to men’s. This acknowledgement that the word “unisex” really is a misnomer when it comes to t-shirts (because the typical female is shaped differently from the typical male in important ways) would go a long way toward making women feel more included, and make it much easier for these women to fulfill the intended purpose of labeled t-shirts (wearing them, and thereby spreading the message of whatever that label represents) because the shirts will look better on them, not having been made to fit men.

Trollish disagreement: You are just trying to find ways to create discord and emphasize exclusiveness rather than inclusiveness. “Standard” t-shirts really are unisex– they aren’t for men, and they don’t look any better on men. If you don’t think they look good on you, then you should just not buy one and shut up about it. Or maybe we should get rid of t-shirts altogether. It doesn’t matter because nobody wears those things anyway, and it’s been this way for a very long time so you’re just demanding something extra and special. In asking for this thing that suits you more, you have stopped fighting for equality across the board and are just pursuing your own interests.

Yes, seriously.

*facepalm*

I’m not going to go over the (obvious, shouldn’t have to be said) response to this, because it has been made by Greta Christina and others on her blog post already and you can just go read them. I’m just saying that this kind of thing is really tiring. Tiring to read, tiring to rebut, tiring to contemplate that people can say write such things presumably with a straight face.

So if or when the urge arises to dismiss the very real and necessary work involved in combating this nonsense, think again. Certain people function as bullshit lightning rods. Greta Christina’s one of them.

When talking about laws impinging on freedom, laws that impinge on important freedoms matter. But laws that impinge on unimportant freedoms matter more.

Why?

Because a law that says you fundamentally may not say what you think or feel, own your own property, express a meaningful choice about your rulers and representatives, or conduct your personal relationships and interactions as you choose certainly represents an obvious threat to basic human happiness and flourishing.

But a law that constitutes a threat to a specific way or specific version of expressing one’s thoughts, the ability to own one’s own property, to vote as one sees fit, or to relate to others as one chooses, amounts to the government saying “Even this I may forbid.” Certainly a government which can prohibit the most benign and superficial expression of a freedom can find justification to prohibit the more significant. And it is these admonitions, which address particular expressions and behavior that the majority do not desire, that the majority will not rise up and defend.

In discussion about Gloria Allred’s attempt to prosecute Rush Limbaugh at Dispatches, a commenter called Harold observed the following (the first line is a quote from another comment, to which he is responding):

Is Allred trying to give Limbaugh the upper hand in the court of public opinion?

I believe she would not care one way or another.
A group of people exist who attempt to “take over” popular progressive stances and make themselves the “only real” advocates.
In doing so, they consciously or unconsciously value their own ego more than the cause they are ostensibly associated with.
To test for this propensity, simply ask yourself –
1) “If the issue I claim to be motivated by were resolved in the way I claim to want, to the great benefit of those I claim to ‘speak for’, but I received no direct credit or recognition, would I be happy?”
2) “Can the issue ever be resolved to my satisfaction, or will I ‘up the ante’ any time a resolution seems near, even if the resolution gives what I previously seemed to be demanding?”
3) “If people I don’t like for some reason actually support my side of the issue I claim to be motivated by, do I react by angrily trying to ‘disqualify’ them from being ‘true’ supporters, rather than forming common cause with them (on that issue)?”
If the answer to any of these is “yes”, then you are not really exactly an advocate for gender equality, gay rights, animal welfare, or whatever it is. You are actually an egotist, who prefers that the injustice you claim to object to continue, so that you can continue to pose as a crusading martyr. And in this way, you are consciously or unconsciously a strong ally for those you claim to most oppose.

I like it. It’s a test that people who find themselves acting as spokespersons for any movement should probably take for themselves periodically. That is, if they don’t want others applying it for them, later on down the line.

Technically this doesn’t count as me saying something, because it’s Jon Stewart saying something…right? A lot of things. A lot of very funny things, regarding Limbaugh but specifically regarding Republican presidential candidates’ and Fox News’ reactions to his shenanigans:

I write a lot about very particular things that have happened, and then try to extrapolate a larger significance. This is satisfying to me, but I try to be aware that there is definitely a ratchet in people’s brains that rises and lowers according to the specificity of what they encounter, and if the ratchet won’t go low enough then they won’t be interest in the particular thing in question. When the specific concern is not your concern, your brain says “Nope, not interested,” possibly dismisses the person dwelling on it as petty, and moves on.

A person who moves exclusively in the general, by contrast, can seem basic, callous, or inept. Like they have stepped back far enough that all of the details have blurred, and it becomes easy to make general statements that are unoriginal and uninteresting, though trivially true. The generalist wants to make general statements, while the specifist always increases the perspective a few notches lower and points out important features which distinguish this thing from that thing. Imagine focusing in on Google Earth right down to street view, and then pulling back out until you can see almost an entire hemisphere. I don’t mean to say that what you have to say about what you’re seeing can’t be useful to interested parties, but let’s just say that not all parties are going to be interested. And they will resent you when you’re trying to apply general statements to specific situations.

I’m not going to tie this general observation to a specific incidence today, which is unusual for me. But even though it may seem blurry as a result, I hope it has some relevance.

Cross-posted from State of Formation.

I think Gene Marks has now been thoroughly excoriated for his column “If I Were a Poor Black Kid” on the Forbes web site last week. In his effort to explain how it’s still possible for underprivileged kids to succeed, he succeeded only in displaying a shocking lack of empathy. By that I don’t mean that he demonstrated a lack of concern for the poor black kids of the world and their needs– I mean that he literally failed at perspective-taking, in such a spectacular way that it’s hard to believe that he was serious (though apparently he was), which has made the column a golden opportunity for mockery. Jenée Desmond-Harris writes in The Root:

Middle-aged, white Forbes contributing writer Gene Marks, in his recent piece, “If I Were a Poor Black Kid,” presented some now-infamous ideas for how he would personally rise to success if he suddenly found himself young, African American, and poverty-stricken.  Marks would “get technical,” learn software,” “learn how to write code,” “figure out where to learn more online,” “become an expert at Google Scholar,” and regularly peruse the CIA World Factbook. He would then get himself into a top school, and he would “succeed.” The end.

Oh. If only Marks had given out this priceless advice before, we would have eliminated racial inequalities long ago.

Not really.

As a curious side note, it’s unclear how this is any different from what he would do if he were a poor white kid. But also, there’s no word in the piece on how Marks imagines that he would, as a poor child, suddenly be infused with the perspective and sophistication of a middle-class adult. In addition, he, perhaps unintentionally, admits that his advice is useless to all but a select few gifted, mature, and lucky children. (He doesn’t have any thoughts on what he would do if he were not a “special kind of kid” who miraculously became aware of the admissions processes of magnet schools and the value of TED talks and the Khan Academy.)

Melanie Tannenbaum, on her blog psysociety, puts it this way:

My immediate reaction was to hate the article. I found it insulting, ignorant, and just plain short-sighted. As I commented in my own link on Facebook, “[To summarize], ‘This is what I would do if I were born into a completely different set of circumstances, a completely different family, a completely different social support system, a completely different school district, a completely different body with a completely different skin tone and a completely different way that people in public respond to me, yet I somehow still retained all of the benefits, knowledge, and access to resources as a middle-aged, middle-class white man.’”

Indeed. Marks’ column reads as if he was attempting to describe what would happen if he had body-swapped with a poor black child in a movie…the most boring body-swap movie ever, if what he says he’d do in this different body and environment is true. And, it goes without saying, not terribly useful when it comes to addressing what he was addressing, which are the opportunities available and likely to be utilized by people who are actually born in the bodies and environments in question. Having acknowledged this, however, Tannenbaum the doctoral candidate in psychology studying “the effects of power, status, and social class on attitudes and behavior” goes on to observe the following:

However, upon re-reading the article and giving it a little more thought, I’ve come to realize that the real issue with the article isn’t that the author, Gene Marks, is necessarily racist, or even really ignorant. After all, he acknowledges right off the bat that the system is unfair, and that children from other areas of town have it much harder than his own, privileged children do. Marks clearly has some knowledge of the unfairness of “the system.” So the real question is, how could he then go on to write such a short-sighted article, completely missing any sort of perspective on what it means to actually be a member of the community to which he is proselytizing?

What follows is essentially an unpacking of the psychology of privilege. And privilege, it seems, is what we’re talking about here– specifically, the unconscious ignorance of the ways in which advantage and power affect one’s perspective. Tannenbaum goes over two experiments in which subjects were primed with (prompted to have at the front of their minds) notions of self-empowerment, and shows how this actually causes people to assume that others know what they know:

In other words, powerful participants were more likely to overweight the special, privileged information that they had, and they subsequently predicted how other people would (or should) respond to certain situations as if the other people had access to that same, privileged knowledge as well.

Sound familiar?

To be momentarily blunt, powerful people often fail to correct for the fact that other people don’t have the same special knowledge that they do. When they think about how other people should respond to situations, they are significantly more likely to overweight the information that they happen to have (like, say, knowledge about the vast amount of educational technology that is available, assuming one knows where to look for it), and less likely to consider the fact that not everyone else has the same knowledge base.

Well, that’s not news, comes the reply from any of the not-so-privileged among us. The most powerful people are often members of the majority, which allows them to make their experience the “norm” which everyone else comes to know whether they want to or not, but there is nothing compelling them to come to know the experiences of minorities. The other important aspect of privilege is that the privileged are not forced by anything in particular to see through anyone else’s eyes, to acknowledge that their own experience in life is not universal.

Still, it’s one thing to think that what you know and experience is more important than what others know and experience. It’s quite another to be unconsciously ignorant of the fact that other people have different knowledge and experiences, which is what the experiments suggest. That’s what I mean by “failing at perspective-taking”– being unable to process that someone who is not you has a different perspective than you do, perhaps a very different one.

Most of us have had the experience of talking to someone about our problems and hearing that person say “Well, if it were me, I would…” followed by a description of some course of action that we would never pursue, assuming it is even possible for us. One has to wonder what exactly they believe the benefit of offering such an observation to be. That is basically what Gene Marks did in his column, causing its readers to collectively scratch their heads and wonder what the benefit of that was supposed to be.

There are two fundamental short-cuts to empathy (really understanding things from someone else’s point of view) that have proven themselves time and time again: similarity and familiarity.

If you’re very similar to the person in question, it’s not very much of a stretch to see things like they do because after all it’s almost how you yourself see things. Alternately, if the person in question is not much like you but you know him/her really well, it’s easier to see things from his/her perspective just because you’re used to doing so. Privilege means being similar to most people, or at least most powerful people. Never being the “other,” the one who is marked as different.

But that doesn’t mean empathy is impossible– the moral progress of a society is marked in part by the gradual realization by the privileged that they have this status to begin with, and this is accomplished by becoming familiar enough with the different experience of “others” that it is possible to see through their eyes and recognize how similar they actually are. Where this realization occurs, you will find members of majorities fighting for the rights and interests of minorities. Where it fails, you will find apathy and hostility born of that particular kind of ignorance that privilege conveys.

At the end of her post, Tannanbaum acknowledges the ways in which she herself is privileged. I have my own. One of them– access to education– is how I can afford to analyze the mechanisms by which privilege affects perspective in the first place, which might be ironic but hopefully does not invalidate such an analysis.

Empathy and sympathy are often conflated for a reason– the former can lead quite naturally to the latter in the process of understanding allowing for recognition of similarities, and it becomes harder to be angry and blame when you find yourself identifying with the target of such. But we can blame and empathize at the same time. We really can, and both are important for mutual growth– the blame so that the blamed can recognize their error, and empathy so that accusers don’t perceive themselves as errorless. In this way, the conversation can be elevated.

Cross-posted from State of Formation.

University of Nebraska Assistant Coach Ron Brown prayed on behalf of his football team and that of Penn State prior to their game on November 12th, in the wake of the latter university’s scandal regarding former head coach Joe Paterno. Which you already know about if you haven’t been living under a rock for roughly the past week and a half, so you don’t need any commentary on it from me. But Brown thought that God needed a comment on the matter, specifically regarding manhood and young boys:

“There are a lot of little boys around the country, today, who are watching this game. And they’re trying to figure out what the definition of manhood is all about. Father, this is it right here. I pray that this game will be a training ground of what manhood looks like. And we will compete with fierce intensity. With the honor, and the gifts, and the talents that you’ve given us. And may we be reminded, Lord, as it says in John 1:14, that Jesus is full of grace and truth. May the truth be known!”

Indeed– may the truth be known. And the truth is that a coach from a public university found it appropriate to use a scandal involving child molestation as an opportunity to teach little boys what manhood is, via a football and religious proclamations. I saw this  and thought “I can’t be the only person believes this to be very, very wrong.” And I’m not– it’s just that it’s hard to articulate all of the things wrong about it.
Hemant Mehta decided to re-write Brown’s statements to be something that is, in Mehta’s eyes, more useful:

“Here’s what Ron Brown could’ve said to the teams — and the crowd of over 100,000 — that would’ve made a real difference — instead of the worthless tripe that came out instead:

‘We’ve been through a lot this past week, but it’s nothing compared to what Jerry Sandusky’s victims have been through. We can never let something like this happen again.

If any of you ever sees abuse taking place — on the field, off the field, after you graduate — it doesn’t matter who the abuser is, go to the police immediately.

If you’re ever the victim of such abuse, please tell someone you trust what happened. It doesn’t matter what you think about the person who did it to you, and no one will ever think less of you for turning them in.

If you had nothing to do with the situation but you still want to help, well, we need more people like you. Please encourage your fans, friends, and family members to make a donation to a child abuse prevention organization.

That will do more for these children that our god ever can.’

That would’ve taken real courage to say, so I’m not surprised we didn’t hear anything even remotely resembling that before the game.”

I suppose it would have taken real courage to say, but only because of the last line– and that line should be left out. Everything else is not particularly courageous, but it is certainly important. It’s what people need to hear and know, valuable information. It doesn’t exactly take the place of what Brown said, though, because it’s not ceremonial. It doesn’t address the communal mood, the event that is about to take place. It’s a comment that should be made in addition to something else, and here’s the important thing…that “something else” should not be a prayer. This is something overlooked in Sean O’Neil’s essay concerning what he calls “muscular Christianity”:

“John Sandusky is an older man who used his prestige and power to abuse boys. Perhaps, then, Brown’s prayer about a redemptive display of masculinity merely reinforces a truism: that decent men would never abuse anyone. Since lines were transgressed in obviously horrific ways perhaps the boundaries of decency need to be reinforced in just as obvious a fashion. This still raises other questions, though: Who gets to re-draw these borders at such a sensitive time of (national) crisis? Also, what will young boys learn about gender from the dominant religious portrayals of manhood in muscular Christianity?

Muscular Christianity refers to the wedding of traditional conceptions of masculinity—such as bravery, chivalry, and athleticism—with evangelical Christian emphases on personal conversion and biblical devotion. Tim Tebow is perhaps the quintessential muscular Christian, combining religious and athletic vigor on the most visible athletic platform in the country: the National Football League.

Muscular Christianity is also developed in more pedestrian venues, on college campuses among groups such as the Fellowship for Christian Athletes. Evangelicals espousing some form of muscular Christianity (not a term that most would use) tend to interpret the Bible conservatively—especially with regards to sexual norms. Gay sex among consenting adults, for example, is usually labeled sinful in such evangelical contexts. There are few if any progressive religious voices in these settings. . .

If the only religious voices heard on the fields are the most conservative on issues of human sexuality, there may be few opportunities for athletes to combine vigorous athleticism, strong religious commitment, and fidelity to LGBT identities in the same breath.”

Here are the sticking points for me in this:  1) “traditional conceptions of masculinity” and 2) “religious voices heard on the fields.” Exclude them both, please.

Why? Let’s start with the former. I hate to point out the obvious, but “LGBT identities” often do not conform to “traditional concepts of masculinity.” Nor is there any reason why they should, considering that “traditionally masculine” people are often outright phobic or hateful of those who are non-traditional. Just as much or more than being brave, chivalrous (ugh) or athletic, traditional masculinity entails being straight.

And so far as I can tell, there is nothing about being non-straight, non-traditionally masculine, that inhibits one’s athleticism. So maybe when it comes to football or any other sport, it would be better to call a spade a spade and emphasize that. Those attributes of character that are desirable to have also– bravery, stalwartness, reliability, foresight, cunning, and so on– are by no means exclusive to the masculine. Especially not the traditional kind.

(I will also mention, though I hope it’s not necessary, the significance of focusing on how to tell/show young boys what it means to be a [traditional] man in the wake of scandal surrounding child rape. Just as with the scandals within the Catholic Church, there are plenty– perhaps Asst. Coach Brown is one of them– who interpret such an act as part and parcel of homosexuality. As something that gays just do, or that just gays do. This bigoted belief has no place on the football field or anywhere else.

Let it be emphasized: a decent person would not abuse anyone. Indecent people come in all sorts of gender and sexual configurations.)

As for religious voices on that field…why do we need those?

Even disregarding the question of whether it constitutes a church/state violation to have a coach for a public university’s football team to deliver a prayer before a game, O’Neil’s grievance above illustrates precisely the problem with having a religious invocation in the first place– it creates a debate about whether it’s the right religion. Whose beliefs should prevail.

Because for everyone who doesn’t worship Jesus and/or doesn’t appreciate the treatment of Jesus in the prayer given, the ritual becomes a period of discomfort rather than bolstering. And for many of those to whom the words about Jesus ring pure and true, any other religious message will seem either diluted or outright blasphemous. By all means, don’t prevent the players from practicing their faith as they see fit. But leading everyone in a massive group prayer such as this seems designed to be unnecessarily divisive and yet squelch any minority views.

I can’t help but wonder how many of those players kneeling around Assistant Coach Ron Brown feel resentful, silly, or confused. How many wish that a message acknowledging the situation but encouraging them to play a good game could be delivered without being wrapped in platitudes about what it means to be a real man and a real believer. How many of that group would never breathe a word about such sentiments, for fear that they would be ridiculed, hated, maybe even attacked by others.

How sad that is. And how completely unnecessary.