Broussard is predictably getting beaten to a rhetoric pulp on Twitter. And while I think today is a wonderful, watershed day for people (especially the artist formerly known as Ron Artest) to live as open and free as they wanna be, I agree with the New York Post editorial Robert George here:
Chris Broussard spoke what more than a few players feel. If such comments aren't expressed, a real conversation can't be had.
I'm trying to come up with what "real conversation" Broussard is adding when he says Collins is a sinner who is "walking in open rebellion to Jesus Christ." But here's where Welch goes with this as he brings in the civil rights movement in sports and the racism Jackie Robinson faced:
Now, there is no doubt that Jackie Robinson vehemently disagreed with this go-slow sentiment, but he also understood that you can't always persuade fence-sitters through a two-handed chest-shove.* And sometimes engaging with the I'm not ready to go that far just yet crowd brings out the best in activists. See, for example, Martin Luther King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."
Bigotry brings conflict which brings "real conversations" which brings out the best in people, not the worst, so apparently we need bigotry, racism, and outright ignorance in America because FREEDOMS AND THE LIBERTY.
On the other hand, Welch basically saying that the struggle of racism was necessary in order to forge a leader as brilliant as Dr. King is just about the best example of false equivalence Glibertarian nonsense that I've ever seen, so there's that. Dave Zirin's take on Jason Collins is worth reading just as a reminder that Welch is full of crap, as usual, and the real change comes from those standing up to idiots like him who give bigotry acceptable cover in the first place because "conflict creates change". That's great if you're a megalomaniac with a space fortress and an army of flying cyborg raptor ninjas, not so great if you want to live in a world where people are decent towards each other because people are decent.
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One of the things that constantly infuriates me about the Right using the example of Jackie Robinson not hitting back when he was thrown at or spiked or taunted was they seem to think he was like that his whole career with the Dodgers, actually in 1949, much to Jackie’s relief, Ricky told Jackie it was time to take the gloves off. And he did doing things like bunting so the pitcher had to cover first base at which point Jackie would barrel into him (the man was a football star as well) which cut down on the number of balls thrown at his head and sliding hard into who had been trying to cripple him when they were running the base paths and he was fielding (which again showed the days of quietly taking abuse were over).
1949 was also the year he won the MVP award.
So yes Jackie did take it for a while but after he had poven he could, he also went and proved that he didn’t have to and he was quite capable of dishing it out as well as anybody.
This part is pretty much ignored even in films like 42.
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