It is worth giving some thought from time to time to what we are being sensitized to, and what we are being desensitized about. A couple of weeks ago, the National Basketball Association had its annual all-star game in Las Vegas. It wasn’t so long ago that professional sports leagues avoided Las Vegas as if it were Neptune, because of the city’s connection to gambling, organized crime, prostitution, etc. But it’s probably just a matter of time now before the NBA, the NFL, the NHL or major league baseball locate a franchise in Las Vegas. People have been going to Las Vegas to gamble since before I was born, but casinos are everywhere now, and every other American city seems to envy the once-in-a-lifetime decadence which used to be unique to Las Vegas. By the way, I’ve been to Las Vegas, too. But I went to a funeral and skipped the city’s other attractions.
Before the NBA all-star game, a former player named Tim Hardaway said he hated gays, would have felt uncomfortable with gays on his team, and didn’t want to share a locker room with them. Some of what Tim Hardaway said was inappropriate. I don’t think it’s right to hate homosexuals, and I wouldn’t have said that. On the other hand, there was a bit of common sense to part of what he said. I recall once being required to have a physical when I was seventeen. It wasn’t a complete physical; rather, it was the “drop your drawers, turn your head and cough” physical which every man is familiar with. In the room with me was a male doctor and a female nurse. I accepted the nurse’s presence as a medical professional, but I remember being disgusted when the nurse left just as soon as the doctor said I could pull up my pants. She didn’t seem to have any other purpose for being there, except to watch me undress. I know most women have had similar experiences, and I’ve heard a lot of stories about their feelings about them. I would have been even more uncomfortable if the doctor had told me he was gay.
That sort of common sense has vanished from the NBA. The NBA uninvited Tim Hardaway from its all-star events, and it said his statements didn’t reflect the league’s position. The obvious question for me is why a basketball league needs a position about homosexuality. Since the NBA seems to need a position about gay rights, I wonder if I should refer to it as the NB Gay.
All of that was old news until yesterday, when the Sacramento Kings felt obliged to suspend Ron Artest indefinitely for assaulting his girlfriend and preventing her from calling 911. Ron Artest has been a problem child since he joined the league, and this is not his first physical assault. There have been five 911 calls from his residence, just since August. There have always been second chances for Artest until now, but I suspect Tim Hardaway won’t have any second chances, even though he apologized. Is so-called hate speech a greater offense than charging spectators or slamming one’s girlfriend to the floor? In 1963, Medgar Evers was shot in the back. The “n” word, no matter how despicable it is, never killed him. What people say is important, but we are far too concerned about what people say, and not nearly concerned enough about what they do. The NBA is straining out gnats and swallowing camels.
On another subject, a rookie policeman was killed recently in Glendale, AZ. He survived two tours of duty in Iraq, only to return to the states and be gunned down by a career criminal. For all of the justifiable grief about American casualties in Iraq, it’s worth wondering what sort of America our soldiers will be returning to.
A man in Michigan recently killed and dismembered his wife, got on TV, pretending to be innocent, and cried tears of insincerity on camera about his wife’s disappearance.
Yesterday, in an act of personal terrorism, an Indiana man deliberatley crashed a small airplane into his mother-in-law’s house, killing himself and his eight-year-old daughter, who was on the airplane with him, after calling his ex-wife, the girl’s mother, to tell her she would never see her daughter again. I can almost hear him saying to his daughter earlier, “Honey, wouldn’t it be fun to ride in an airplane today?” I wonder how long she knew her father intended to kill her.
Then there’s the 21-year-old man in Connecticut who repeatedly stabbed his seventeen-year-old wife, and then gave the bloody knife to their two-year-old and said, “Now you stab mommy.”
I could go on to mention the video of adults in Texas teaching a two-year-old and a five-year-old to smoke marijuana. I wonder if the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORMAL) think that’s normal. Do they expect us to believe it wouldn’t happen if marijuana was legal?
Maybe I should just take the media’s word for it, that George W. Bush is America’s Hitler. He stole two elections, he must be stopped, and the only thing else which matters is who’s going to wind up with Anna Nicole Smith’s money and who fathered her baby. But I don’t really want to hear about George Bush or Anna Nicole Smith anymore. I want to hear journalists get on the air, read the above news stories, and cry the sort of tears I heard Israelis cry after the 1972 olympics. Then the news will be worth watching again.
I realize these are news stories, not commonplace events. But I can’t help feeling that America needs a Jonah more than Nineveh ever did. I would volunteer to be the new Jonah, but I haven’t been called, and apparently no one else has been either. Perhaps God doesn’t warn us, because he knows we wouldn’t listen.
Tags: GAY RIGHTS, MORAL DECLINE
