The issue with you liberal woke sorts is that you haven’t any humorousness.
You’re piling on Tony Dungy as a result of he has been passing alongside anti-LGBTQ misinformation to his Twitter followers. Nothing worse than you over-reactors, not having the ability to take a joke!
Final week, Dungy tweeted a response to a Minnesota state lawmaker discussing whether or not to place tampons in males’s restrooms for the comfort of transgender people who use the lads’s room.
“That’s nothing,” Dungy tweeted. “Some college districts are placing litter bins within the college loos for the scholars who establish as cats. Essential to handle each scholar’s wants.”
He deleted the tweet after about seven hours, with no rationalization or apology.
Let me give everybody somewhat lesson in humor. Any time somebody says, “That’s nothing,” a phrase usually accompanied by the hooking of 1’s thumbs of their suspenders, chances are high she or he is about to ship a zingy, hilarious topper to what was simply stated.
We
ought to
rebuke Dungy for plagiarism, nevertheless. He stole his litter-box joke from far-right, gay-bashing on-line mythology. It’s a very talked-about “joke” in that crowd, and so hilarious that hundreds of thousands who’ve heard it declare to consider it to be true. That widespread, misguided, ignorant acceptance of hate disinformation is harmful, after all, however you gotta hand it to these people for attempting to convey somewhat laughter into this severe world.
It’s so unfair to characterize anti-LGBTQ extremists as missing a humorousness. Take Andy Wommack, as an example. This strident anti-gay Christian evangelist has an enormous viewers, not less than partly due to his shut private friendships and dealing relationship with well-known TV soccer speaking heads like Tony Dungy and James Brown. Each Dungy and Brown are annual audio system at Wommack’s massive televised shindig.
We’re not straying from sports activities right here, by the best way. Wommack is an NFL insider — he staunchly defended Jon Gruden towards claims that the then-Raiders coach was racist, sexist and homophobic. The day after Wommack’s all-knowing tirade on behalf of his pal, emails have been launched clearly displaying Gruden to be racist, sexist and homophobic. I guess Wommack acquired snicker over how Coach Gruden had put one over on him.
Laughter is the very best drugs, and right here’s an instance of basic right-wing fundamentalist humor: In a podcast, Dungy’s bestie Wommack cited statistics displaying that transgender children have a a lot larger suicide price than do so-called straight children.
“So homosexuality is 3 times worse than smoking,” Wommack stated, winding up for the killer punch line. “We should put a label throughout their foreheads: ‘This may very well be hazardous to your well being.’”
Come on, give it up for a very humorous fellow, making some extent of wounding individuals for his personal leisure — and thus doing his half to assist make that statistic come true.
After all, joke is one thing to share, and Dungy’s “joke” was shared by not less than 20 conservative political candidates and elected officers. Like Dungy, they didn’t current it as a joke — that might spoil the joke!
However again to Dungy and his double profession as a soccer analyst and spreader of hateful humor. Dungy bases his beliefs, which embrace robust opposition to same-sex marriage and a distaste for homosexual gamers within the NFL, on his and others’ interpretation of the Bible. Which is why he can’t keep on with sports activities and as a substitute began publicly talking out towards marriage equality when he was nonetheless teaching the Colts again in 2006, or towards NBA participant Jason Collins popping out in 2013, and towards Michael Sam getting an opportunity to play within the NFL after he got here out in 2014.
Some individuals in sports activities,
like Tim Hardaway, in his reflections about his previous hateful anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, make an effort and outgrow these sentiments once they have them. Not Coach Dungy. He was in a rush to maneuver on to talking on the “March for Life” on Friday, transferring into dictating girls’s decisions in well being care.
All as a result of Dungy claims to be a person of religion, as they are saying. He expressed on Twitter that Damar Hamlin’s harm on the soccer discipline was a part of “God’s plan.” When Hamlin started to recuperate, Dungy tweeted, “As I walked this morning I thanked God for a way He has watched over Damar Hamlin. I couldn’t assist however consider Romans 8:28 and God working by a tragedy to assist unify us.
“Over the past week I believe we’ve realized that life is simply too vital to let variations separate us.”
Then got here Dungy’s litter-box tweet. Now that’s humorous.
Scott Ostler is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. E mail: sostler@sfchronicle.com