The gay athlete post

The particulars of Jason Collins's coming out - the fact that he's pretty much at the tail end (pun intended or not? you decide) of his NBA career, what it does for his endorsement-deal prospects - are being sufficiently covered elsewhere.  What primarily interests me here is its importance as symbol of how close the forces of wickedness are to complete cultural victory.

Entering into a discussion about anything related to homosexuality's role in our society demonstrates how hard it is to avoid the utterly banal.  There is nothing constructive about saying, in reaction to this, or any of the near-daily developments on that front, "We need to get back to God's design for the family structure" on the one hand, or "Who cares about his sex life?  What does it have to do with the game of basketball?" on the other.  Such statements, from wherever they emanate along the sociocultural spectrum, have all the conversational value of, "My, the weather's nice today."

This is not to say that the points that have been made, just because they've been made so frequently, aren't of primary importance.  The fact that the push for homosexual acceptance is qualitatively different from the race-based civil-rights struggle of fifty years ago must not be obscured.  The same goes for the whole question of how fellow athletes - or soldiers - are to react in the shower.  These are very definitely ongoing proper topics for talk shows, blogs and podcasts.

Something I see as particularly significant in this situation is the quickness with which the MEC ("I couldn't be prouder") and his wife ("We've got your back") chose to stake firm positions on Collins's announcement.  The glee they feel about this latest success in their Great Leveling Project is on full display.  The priority they place on that leveling project is obvious when one considers that, at a moment of deteriorating stability in several Middle Eastern countries (Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya), a moment of decision regarding Iran that is no longer "fast approaching," but upon us, an unprecedented degree of threat from North Korea, an ongoing European economic crisis, unsustainable public debt and continued economic malaise in the United States, and, of course, a hair-raisingly large jihadist infiltration of our society, they think there's even time to mention it in public statements.

Mind you, I'm not staking out a "with-all-the-problems-facing-us-what-are-we-doing-concerning-ourselves-with-sexualtiy" position.  Far from it; I think the warping of assumptions as old as the species is a phenomenon of crisis proportions as far as I'm concerned.

Nor am I in the "just-play-ball-and-keep-your-love-life-to-yourself" camp.  The fact that a sport like basketball is supposed to showcase men who are masculine - competitive, willing to make hard contact between elbows and faces and knock others to the floor, willing to assume particular roles in manly forms of team effort -  in their entirety (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual aspects) necessarily comes up against the question of the value of watching men engage in this contest under unprecedented premises.

In a sense, it's fitting that basketball should be the context for this latest front in this particular cultural battle.  Basketball is all about blocking shots, crafting a defense that leaves the player holding the ball with no options other than a turnover.  That's what those posing the Great Cultural Dare are attempting to do to us.  Are you conservatives going to make your case on statistical grounds? scriptural grounds? common-sense grounds?  biological grounds?  We've got you covered, say the Levelers; we have you hemmed in.  We control the narrative to such a degree that the low-reflection public will yawn at the triteness of any arguments you put forth.

And I have no doubt that a large swath of American society is indeed yawning at Collins's announcement.  That's chilling.  Jadedness is the last step before abnegation of humanity.