US women soccer players and the matter of who starts culture-war battles

 Real Clear Politics often usefully juxtaposes two opposing takes on an issue currently on the national radar. Today there was an example involving the US Women's Soccer Team.

There's Olivia Luppino's piece at Salon, which employs as what she sees as the most useful arrow in her quiver the fact that the Very Stable Genius and his drool-besotted leg-humpers chimed in. This, in her formulation, delegitimizes any aspersions that might be cast on the team.

This, boys and girls, is the kind of situation I've been trying to bring to the fore of your attention since 2015: Letting that opportunistic, rudderless, bombastic fool anywhere near the classic conservative argument sets conservatism up as a punching bag for progressives. And in the years following the establishment of his cult, its memes and slogans - and his social-media posts - have for all intents and purposes drowned out the reasoned and history-steeped arguments by which conservatives had always made their case.

Anyway, along with citing Trumpist examples of childish reactions to the team's World Cup loss, she trots out the equal-pay "issue." She also does mention instances in which women soccer players have explicitly dissed the United States on the playing field, as well as Megan Rapinoe's history of vocally wading into sociocultural matters - from the left, of course. Luppino just reports this with no commentary, as if anybody reading it would, of course, find that perfectly acceptable.

Listed immediately below Luppino's column is a piece about this at National Review by Noah Rothman entitled "No, Republicans Did Not Politicize Women's Soccer." He offers, shall we say, a different perspective:

For the better part of a decade now, the U.S. women’s soccer team has served — often willingly and with the direct participation of its members — as the avatars of a campaign to illustrate the supposed “pay gap” endured by women performing the exact same roles as men. President Barack Obama deployed the team’s members as human props in a campaign to popularize the injustice of the so-called pay gap — a claim so baseless Obama’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics and a handful of U.S. district courts disputed the pay gap’s very existence.

U.S. women’s national soccer team co-captain Megan Rapinoe has delighted in starting political feuds with Republican lawmakers and using her celebrity to advance divisive political causes. She is not shy about using the most incendiary language available to make her points, even at the risk of alienating would-be consumers of her sport. She has so deliberately inserted herself into the national political debate that Democratic pollsters tested her appeal in a hypothetical presidential election against Donald Trump. And Rapinoe isn’t alone. In 2019, the Associated Press celebrated the team’s “off-the-field activist role” as champions for a variety of “social-justice causes.”

Rapinoe and her teammates engaged in polarizing political debates, and that activism has had a polarizing effect. Republican lawmakers are not responsible for injecting politics into the apolitical conduct of professional athletics; they’ve merely noticed its injection and singled out those doing the injecting for criticism.

This inversion of cause and effect is the foundation upon which all “Republicans pounce” commentary rests. It is a bankrupt style of journalism that seeks to redirect a reader’s attention away from an event — usually, one Democrats find discomfiting — by highlighting the Republican reaction to the event. If the enterprise is successful, the public becomes conditioned to the idea the GOP’s response to a controversy is more newsworthy than the controversy itself.

BTW, let's look at the key paragraph of the district-courts link Rothman provides, just to be sure the record is set straight:

Klauser ruled May 1 the women could not prove discrimination over pay and granted in part the USSF’s motion for a partial summary judgment. He said the union for the women’s national team rejected an offer to be paid under the same pay-to-play structure as the men’s national team’s collective bargaining agreement and the women accepted guaranteed salaries and greater benefits along with a different bonus structure.

The team collectively, as an organization, chose to go a different route regarding pay.

But two groups need to understand truths each will find uncomfortable. MAGA needs to see -but won't, which is why the next year and three months is going to be such a political clusterf--- -  that it has precluded any possibility of persuasion or decisive prevalence with its schoolyard gloating. Progressives need to see that by no means is a majority okay with their intention to uproot norms, institutions and understandings about the way the universe is designed that have been distilled over millennia.