Don't Ask Don't Tell For Gay American Pro Athletes?

[Jingthing]

Well we now have the first gay ACTIVE major sports player coming out in the USA.

Good news, no doubt.

Personally, I'm just not feeling super excited about the news though but as someone who met Dave Kopay back in the day, I certainly perceive it's historical significance.

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2013/05/jason_collins_gay_why_do_so_many_people_want_us_to_know_how_little_they.html

What Limbaugh, Francesa, Brando, and Samuel are asking for is a
“don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for athletes. Before Jason Collins raised
his hand, that was effectively the rule in major pro sports. Now that
DADT is history in the U.S. military, the locker room is one of the few
places left where the closet door is still dead-bolted shut.

That’s why the “I don’t care” crowd is so foolish, and the “I don’t
care” message is so dangerous. Gay athletes have always been
stigmatized, forced to live in fear that they’d be ostracized by their
teammates or outed on someone else’s terms. As Nathaniel Frank explained in Slate earlier this week, “The closet has harsh consequences to mental well-being and to the cohesion and integrity of a group,
both because of the emotional repression it causes LGBT people and the
disregard for honesty that it imposes.” The idea that coming out of the
closet means “flaunting” your sexuality is, in most circles, a relic of a
less tolerant time. But until Collins’ public declaration, the sports
world remained trapped in that bigoted past. When someone like Francesa
or Samuel says he just doesn’t want to hear it, he’s reinforcing the
attitudes that led NBA player John Amaechi to hide his true self until
he retired, that had rugby star Gareth Thomas contemplating suicide, and that prevent lots of gay men from trying sports in the first place.

Edited May 6, 2013 by Jingthing

[Suradit69]

Howard Kurtz axed by the Daily Beast after bungling Jason Collins column

And sometimes when coming out is treated as a joke it can come back and bite the butt of the "comedian."

“And yet your initial mistake went beyond just a factual error. In this video that you did for the website The Daily Download, you also mocked him. You said that he ‘played both sides of the court.’ Why did you feel the need to mock him especially after he had just come out to the world as the first pro-male gay athlete?” Byers asked.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/howard-kurtz-apologizes-on-cnn-for-errors-90928.html

The video, which also features Daily Download editor Lauren Ashburn, has been unpublished, but the internet has

. Barely suppressing giggles, Kurtz and Ashburn talk about how Collins' admission that he is gay (giggle) wasn't quite entirely honest (giggle) because he forgot to mention he was once engaged to a woman (giggle giggle).

"Obviously he, in basketball terms, has played both sides of the court," Kurtz said, incomprehensibly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/us-news-blog/2013/may/02/howard-kurtz-daily-beast-fired

Edited May 9, 2013 by Suradit69