By John Ruch
Photo: NFL Coach Tony Dungy in 2007. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Carl Berry)
The vitriolic NFL homophobia reported yesterday by former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe may or may not have happened. But here’s what we know for sure: the NFL has gay players, and the NFL winkingly embraces homophobia to their detriment. So let’s not let this specific dispute cloud our vision on how rotten the NFL already is.
Kluwe says he may or may not have lost his job for vocally supporting same-sex marriage. But there is no doubt that former Indianapolis Colts Coach Tony Dungy kept his job after vocally opposing same-sex marriage in league with a right-wing Christian fundamentalist organization. The NFL, which rightly cracks down on even off-field racism from players and coaches, gave Dungy a free pass on his homophobic bigotry.
It’s a free pass Dungy continues to wave as a football commentator on NBC, which touts him as “the voice and conscience of the NFL” and “Football’s high priest, the oracle who passes judgment on all moral questions.”
The NFL is obviously brutish and backward, a place obsessed with laughably extreme macho stereotypes and possibly America’s last great institutional closet. It’s so rigid and fascistic that even diehard fans call it the No Fun League.
Even so, there’s still some shock to reading the Hitler-esque quote Kluwe claims a special-teams coach taunted him with: “We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows.” (The coach denies saying this and says he has gay family members.)
But then again, consider this: America did round up and kill almost all of the American Indians. Then the NFL embraced a Washington, D.C. team with a grossly racist name alluding to them. And continues to vocally defend the name to this day.
The NFL is bigoted by nature and changes only with immense effort. Despite being loaded with black players, the league had so few black coaches that it was finally pushed to institute the “Rooney Rule” guaranteeing minority-candidate job interviews. That rule was instituted only 10 years ago. Yes, only in the 2000s did the NFL start to take desegregation of its leadership seriously.
A control-freak organization that regularly punishes players for damaging the rep of the “NFL shield” as if it were a police badge, the league now cracks down on any whiff of racism. (Well, except in lucrative jersey-selling team names.) When a Philadelphia Eagles player was caught on tape using a racial slur at a concert last year, the team immediately fined him. And NFL spokesperson Greg Aiello proclaimed the league’s outrage as well.
“The NFL stands for diversity and inclusion,” USA Today quoted him as saying. “Comments like this are wrong, offensive and unacceptable.”
Yet the NFL not only tolerates homophobic bigots who are wrong, offensive and unacceptable; it embraces them and financially partners with them.
A case in point is Athletes in Action, a conservative evangelic Christian group that provides many NFL team chaplains. AIA is a sports-centric affiliate of the homophobic Campus Crusade for Christ (now attempting to be known as “Cru,” bro), which has promoted total lunatics who advocate imprisoning and/or executing LGBT people. The sole mention of “homosexuality” on AIA’s public website is a supposedly maybe-not-officially-endorsed editorial that says it’s great that gays are coming out in sports because now Christians can fix them.
AIA holds an annual Super Bowl Breakfast event, officially sanctioned by the NFL, that hands out a “character” award voted on by NFL players from a list assembled with NFL team help.
Among AIA’s speakers and supporters is Tony Dungy, that “conscience” and “high priest” of the NFL. But the AIA is an obscure pimple on the NFL’s weird underbelly. It was a different, thoroughly public event that forced the NFL to comment on Dungy’s homophobia.
In March 2007, Dungy was fresh from a Super Bowl victory—the first African-American coach to win that championship. How did he choose to celebrate and put that fame to use? He went right to a banquet of the right-wing Indiana Family Institute as VIP and enthusiastically endorsed its attempt to ban same-sex marriage.
IFI is a conservative Christian group that claimed same-sex marriage is part of a supposed “gay agenda” destroying Western civilization. It is an associate group of the infamous Focus on the Family, the nutty right-wing fount of creationism, media censorship efforts and opposition to abortion rights. Focus on the Family believes in continued second-class status for all LGBT people, and no status at all for LGBT couples or parents.
“IFI is saying what the Lord says,” Dungy told the Indianapolis Star as controversy boiled. “You can take that and make your decision on which way you want to be. I’m on the Lord’s side… We’re not anti-anything else. We’re not trying to downgrade anyone else.”
Dungy is quite literally homophobic—scared of dealing with LGBT people. In an interview with Bob Costas later that year, Dungy balked when asked if he’d coach an openly gay player. He’d have to express his Biblical views and then maybe be OK with it, he said.
Granted, Dungy did not hurl a slur at a concert, nor did he call for mass murder. Indeed, Dungy is beloved largely because he’s a polite, decent man who surely would object to such language. But that just makes him a kinder, gentler bigot. The crackpottery he supports leads directly to murder, suicide and loving people kept away from each other, unable to support and care for one another. Because of groups like IFI, LGBT people are split up in their old age, kicked out of jobs, unable to inherit, unable to visit in hospitals, unable to have families. That definitely includes past, present and future NFL players.
So what did NFL spokesperson Greg Aiello, that standard-bearer of the league’s “diversity and inclusion,” have to say about Dungy’s promotion of what is fundamentally a homophobic conspiracy theory group? Why, here, it was just a harmless example of the marketplace of ideas.
“Coach Dungy is speaking for himself and expressing his views, which he is fully entitled to do. No doubt there are people in our league who have a different view,” Aiello mused in a USA Today quote. “We respect the right of employees to have and express their views and don’t regulate the political or religious views of team or league employees.”
“I believe I have made it clear that we have no issue with this dinner,” Aiello put it more bluntly to AfterElton.com (now TheBacklot.com).
Why do NFL employees have no right to express racist-bigot views, but all the right in the world to express homophobic-bigot views? A wild guess: the league itself is homophobic.
The NFL and Dungy remain closely connected in the revolving door of jock punditry. Even though he is now a supposedly independent journalist, the league brings him back regularly as an adviser to committees, teams and players.
And Dungy continues his high-profile homophobia. Milking the NFL’s myth that coaches are model patriarchs and family-values geniuses, Dungy put his mug on a nonprofit called All Pro Dad, part of something called Family First. They’re both parenting support organizations that pretend non-hetero parents don’t exist. Family First forwards counseling requests to—you guessed it—Focus on the Family. (Perhaps not so coincidentally, Focus on the Family is one of the few issue organizations allowed to buy Super Bowl TV ads in recent years.)
Besides its largely covert alliance with AIA, the NFL runs into public homophobia flaps from time to time. Early last year, college players at the Scouting Combine complained that NFL scouts were asking them whether they liked girls, apparently to rule out gay players. An NFL investigation unsurprisingly found that these interrogations were somehow not homophobic, but the New York Attorney General’s Office wasn’t so sure and paid the league a visit.
“Discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation is not consistent with our values and is unacceptable in the National Football League,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement quickly released afterward, according to the New York Times. A legalistic butt-covering rather than a welcome mat, it suggests the league might finally crack down on outright slurs. But obviously the NFL has no problem continuing to ally and associate with preachers of discrimination on a daily basis.
Here’s what Chris Kluwe wrote about the coach he accuses of homophobic death wishes: “It’s inexcusable that someone would use his status as a teacher and a role model to proselytize on behalf of his own doctrine of intolerance, and I hope he never gets another opportunity to pass his example along to anyone else.”
We don’t yet know if it accurately applies to Kluwe’s coach. But it certainly applies to Tony Dungy and to a slew of AIA preachers roaming NFL stadiums.
If the NFL truly is all about diversity and inclusion, it could easily declare itself a gay-welcoming league that wants to open its shameful closet. The NFL could easily ordain that homophobic statements and organizations are detrimental to the league’s brand, ethos and employees.
The Kluwe situation gives the league a golden opportunity to do so. Because whatever the truth of his claims turns out to be, the NFL's longtime homophobia problem isn’t going away—and neither are its closeted gay players.
Photo: NFL Coach Tony Dungy in 2007. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Carl Berry)
The vitriolic NFL homophobia reported yesterday by former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe may or may not have happened. But here’s what we know for sure: the NFL has gay players, and the NFL winkingly embraces homophobia to their detriment. So let’s not let this specific dispute cloud our vision on how rotten the NFL already is.
Kluwe says he may or may not have lost his job for vocally supporting same-sex marriage. But there is no doubt that former Indianapolis Colts Coach Tony Dungy kept his job after vocally opposing same-sex marriage in league with a right-wing Christian fundamentalist organization. The NFL, which rightly cracks down on even off-field racism from players and coaches, gave Dungy a free pass on his homophobic bigotry.
It’s a free pass Dungy continues to wave as a football commentator on NBC, which touts him as “the voice and conscience of the NFL” and “Football’s high priest, the oracle who passes judgment on all moral questions.”
The NFL is obviously brutish and backward, a place obsessed with laughably extreme macho stereotypes and possibly America’s last great institutional closet. It’s so rigid and fascistic that even diehard fans call it the No Fun League.
Even so, there’s still some shock to reading the Hitler-esque quote Kluwe claims a special-teams coach taunted him with: “We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows.” (The coach denies saying this and says he has gay family members.)
But then again, consider this: America did round up and kill almost all of the American Indians. Then the NFL embraced a Washington, D.C. team with a grossly racist name alluding to them. And continues to vocally defend the name to this day.
The NFL is bigoted by nature and changes only with immense effort. Despite being loaded with black players, the league had so few black coaches that it was finally pushed to institute the “Rooney Rule” guaranteeing minority-candidate job interviews. That rule was instituted only 10 years ago. Yes, only in the 2000s did the NFL start to take desegregation of its leadership seriously.
A control-freak organization that regularly punishes players for damaging the rep of the “NFL shield” as if it were a police badge, the league now cracks down on any whiff of racism. (Well, except in lucrative jersey-selling team names.) When a Philadelphia Eagles player was caught on tape using a racial slur at a concert last year, the team immediately fined him. And NFL spokesperson Greg Aiello proclaimed the league’s outrage as well.
“The NFL stands for diversity and inclusion,” USA Today quoted him as saying. “Comments like this are wrong, offensive and unacceptable.”
Yet the NFL not only tolerates homophobic bigots who are wrong, offensive and unacceptable; it embraces them and financially partners with them.
A case in point is Athletes in Action, a conservative evangelic Christian group that provides many NFL team chaplains. AIA is a sports-centric affiliate of the homophobic Campus Crusade for Christ (now attempting to be known as “Cru,” bro), which has promoted total lunatics who advocate imprisoning and/or executing LGBT people. The sole mention of “homosexuality” on AIA’s public website is a supposedly maybe-not-officially-endorsed editorial that says it’s great that gays are coming out in sports because now Christians can fix them.
AIA holds an annual Super Bowl Breakfast event, officially sanctioned by the NFL, that hands out a “character” award voted on by NFL players from a list assembled with NFL team help.
Among AIA’s speakers and supporters is Tony Dungy, that “conscience” and “high priest” of the NFL. But the AIA is an obscure pimple on the NFL’s weird underbelly. It was a different, thoroughly public event that forced the NFL to comment on Dungy’s homophobia.
In March 2007, Dungy was fresh from a Super Bowl victory—the first African-American coach to win that championship. How did he choose to celebrate and put that fame to use? He went right to a banquet of the right-wing Indiana Family Institute as VIP and enthusiastically endorsed its attempt to ban same-sex marriage.
IFI is a conservative Christian group that claimed same-sex marriage is part of a supposed “gay agenda” destroying Western civilization. It is an associate group of the infamous Focus on the Family, the nutty right-wing fount of creationism, media censorship efforts and opposition to abortion rights. Focus on the Family believes in continued second-class status for all LGBT people, and no status at all for LGBT couples or parents.
“IFI is saying what the Lord says,” Dungy told the Indianapolis Star as controversy boiled. “You can take that and make your decision on which way you want to be. I’m on the Lord’s side… We’re not anti-anything else. We’re not trying to downgrade anyone else.”
Dungy is quite literally homophobic—scared of dealing with LGBT people. In an interview with Bob Costas later that year, Dungy balked when asked if he’d coach an openly gay player. He’d have to express his Biblical views and then maybe be OK with it, he said.
Granted, Dungy did not hurl a slur at a concert, nor did he call for mass murder. Indeed, Dungy is beloved largely because he’s a polite, decent man who surely would object to such language. But that just makes him a kinder, gentler bigot. The crackpottery he supports leads directly to murder, suicide and loving people kept away from each other, unable to support and care for one another. Because of groups like IFI, LGBT people are split up in their old age, kicked out of jobs, unable to inherit, unable to visit in hospitals, unable to have families. That definitely includes past, present and future NFL players.
So what did NFL spokesperson Greg Aiello, that standard-bearer of the league’s “diversity and inclusion,” have to say about Dungy’s promotion of what is fundamentally a homophobic conspiracy theory group? Why, here, it was just a harmless example of the marketplace of ideas.
“Coach Dungy is speaking for himself and expressing his views, which he is fully entitled to do. No doubt there are people in our league who have a different view,” Aiello mused in a USA Today quote. “We respect the right of employees to have and express their views and don’t regulate the political or religious views of team or league employees.”
“I believe I have made it clear that we have no issue with this dinner,” Aiello put it more bluntly to AfterElton.com (now TheBacklot.com).
Why do NFL employees have no right to express racist-bigot views, but all the right in the world to express homophobic-bigot views? A wild guess: the league itself is homophobic.
The NFL and Dungy remain closely connected in the revolving door of jock punditry. Even though he is now a supposedly independent journalist, the league brings him back regularly as an adviser to committees, teams and players.
And Dungy continues his high-profile homophobia. Milking the NFL’s myth that coaches are model patriarchs and family-values geniuses, Dungy put his mug on a nonprofit called All Pro Dad, part of something called Family First. They’re both parenting support organizations that pretend non-hetero parents don’t exist. Family First forwards counseling requests to—you guessed it—Focus on the Family. (Perhaps not so coincidentally, Focus on the Family is one of the few issue organizations allowed to buy Super Bowl TV ads in recent years.)
Besides its largely covert alliance with AIA, the NFL runs into public homophobia flaps from time to time. Early last year, college players at the Scouting Combine complained that NFL scouts were asking them whether they liked girls, apparently to rule out gay players. An NFL investigation unsurprisingly found that these interrogations were somehow not homophobic, but the New York Attorney General’s Office wasn’t so sure and paid the league a visit.
“Discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation is not consistent with our values and is unacceptable in the National Football League,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement quickly released afterward, according to the New York Times. A legalistic butt-covering rather than a welcome mat, it suggests the league might finally crack down on outright slurs. But obviously the NFL has no problem continuing to ally and associate with preachers of discrimination on a daily basis.
Here’s what Chris Kluwe wrote about the coach he accuses of homophobic death wishes: “It’s inexcusable that someone would use his status as a teacher and a role model to proselytize on behalf of his own doctrine of intolerance, and I hope he never gets another opportunity to pass his example along to anyone else.”
We don’t yet know if it accurately applies to Kluwe’s coach. But it certainly applies to Tony Dungy and to a slew of AIA preachers roaming NFL stadiums.
If the NFL truly is all about diversity and inclusion, it could easily declare itself a gay-welcoming league that wants to open its shameful closet. The NFL could easily ordain that homophobic statements and organizations are detrimental to the league’s brand, ethos and employees.
The Kluwe situation gives the league a golden opportunity to do so. Because whatever the truth of his claims turns out to be, the NFL's longtime homophobia problem isn’t going away—and neither are its closeted gay players.