Jason Collins Comes Out

If you don't know who Jason Collins is, or why it's important, welcome to the club. I didn't know who he was until yesterday. However, Collins' coming out is significant: he's the first player in a national sports league to come out and express his intention of continuing to play.

I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay.

I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn't the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, "I'm different." If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I'm raising my hand.

With a few notable exceptions, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Joe.My.God. has a good summary of those responding in support, including the President and First Lady, a whole bunch of athletes, Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton (who went to school with Collins), and just about everyone else you can think of. The Red Sox offered him the opportunity to throw the first pitch:

There are, of course, the usual jerks who think this is terrible. Bryan Fischer came out with the hysterical (in both senses of the word, but I doubt he was thinking "funny") observation that now the straight players in the locker room will be "uncomfortable" because they're worried about Collins "eyeballing" them.

Um -- he's been sharing showers with them for twelve years. And isn't it interesting that Fischer feels that he's qualified to speak, not only for NBA players, but their wives? (Hey, Fischer -- remember all the horrible consequences of the repeal of DADT? Oh, wait. . . .)

The one that struck me was this:

What bothers me is not Wallace's tweets -- he doesn't get it, and he admits it -- but the reaction. The headline from the Pink News story catches the tone of what I've seen:

US: NFL player tweets homophobic message hours after first NBA player comes out as gay

The comments at that story are illustrative of what I've seen in other coverage: the assumption that since Wallace didn't immediately accept Collins' announcement without question, he must be a homophobe.

There's a category of people, I've discovered, who spend a lot of time looking for things to be offended about. It's highly prevalent on the PC, identity politics left, and the right has borrowed the idea -- the OneMillionMoms [sic] for example. John Aravosis has a good post on that subject:

It’s part of a growing problem I’ve noticed for years, but have recently felt coming to a head. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to comment about far too many things in the public sphere without offending someone and creating instant outrage, often unmerited. As a result, you end up not wanting to write about the possibly-offending topics, which works to the detriment of the topics involved, unless the writer is a flaming bigot.

In the past few months I’ve been accused of supporting rape, terrorism, and hating trans people, bisexuals, women, immigrants, and Bradley Manning, which apparently encompasses a larger category of mom-and-apple-pie things that I’m sure I must hate or at least have no respect for (apparently I hate Manning because I asked a simple innocuous question in order to better understand what most angered his advocates). The need to be outraged about everything, and usually for insufficient reason, I’m calling Outrage, Inc. It’s the Change-dot-org-ification of advocacy, where with only 30 seconds of effort, you too can be mad as hell about anything, everything, and nothing.

I've had the same experience, having once been accused of racism on a blog which shall remain nameless (but one in which they have turned victimhood into a fine and rare form of bullying) for asking questions. (In point of fact, until that incident, I wasn't much aware of race except as a descriptive category -- the idea of using race as a basis for judgment never occurred to me. That's the way I was raised: I don't see people as categories.)

I'll finish with the comment I left at Aravosis' post:

I've run into too much of that kind of nonsense, and it's not even that I tend to be somewhat plain-spoken: it's been because I dared to question assumptions, which apparently is the one sin that the ideologues on both the right and left consider unforgivable.

Since I don't believe in sin to begin with, I'm now at the point where my response to that sort of crap is simply: "Grow up, get over yourself, and leave the outrage to the OneMillionMoms [sic] and Tony Perkins."

Oh, and congratulations to Jason Collins.