Except in two areas: Gayness and football.

First, the gayness. It is not entirely clear to me why gayosity and all things related is so far down on the list of things to stop officially hating in American society. Yes, yes, there are post-hoc explanations aplenty but I’m not sure if anything really holds up. The thing is, that which is being “granted” to gays today, over the last year and a half and presumably over the next year or so, should have been granted to everyone ever a long time ago, and was in fact officially, legally, granted to almost everyone in the spirit of law and society if not everywhere always on the ground. Forty and nine years have passed from the passage of the Civil Rights Act to the year in which the tide turned and state after state started abrogating absurd anti-gay laws or enacting same sex marriage fairness. I quickly add that a turned tied does not equal an empty harbor; it is just the point at which things begin to flow mostly in a direction opposite, more or less, they were flowing before.

For those of you who don’t know, Minnesota experienced a major fight last year over same sex marriage and I find this deeply embarrassing as a resident here. If there was a state that could be pointed to as the state that gave our country the Civil Rights Act, it is Minnesota. It was the mayor of Minneapolis later elected as a federal representative and eventually Vice President who made that act happen. We are the Civil Rights State, dammit. And we almost passed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage! That election day this amendment, along with another bone-headed constitutional amendment that would have favored Republicans in subsequent elections statewide, as well as the Republican control of the state legislature, were swept away like the stinking offal that it was. But the issue should have never come up. General equality should have been something we had legally in this state decades ago. Making inequality part of our constitution would have been a heinous act by people I can only describe as social criminals. Kidnappers of rights, robbers of freedom, aggravated assaulters of the already repressed, punchers down. They even tried to argue that they were good people doing things that other people simply disagreed with. I think not.

But then there is football. When I moved to Minnesota, the football stadium was named the Hubert H. Humphrey Metro-dome, but most people called it the Metrodome, and only rarely the Humphrey Dome, as though they were embarrassed about Humphrey, the afore mentioned champion of civil rights. When I asked various long-time or born and bred Minnesotans about this, they denied that there was anything going on here. They just call it the “Dome” or the “Metrodome” because that’s easier to say. No anti-Humphrey stuff going on here. No implicit indirect passive aggressive resistance to civil rights going on here. Just easier to say. Dome. Metrodome. Nothing else.

Then, they added another name to the Metrodome. They couldn’t get rid of the Humphrey name but the added “Mall of America” to the name by calling the turf on which the play happened “Mall of America Field” so now the big ugly out of date sports stadium has a name that sounds like the full name of one of those British Counts or something: “The Hubert. H. Humphrey Metrodome, Mall of America Field, Also Known as the Thunderdome the Homerdome and The Dome. At your service.”

And I swear to you that as soon as the thing was called “Mall of America Field” the press stopped calling it conveniently “The Metrodome” (leaving off any mention of Humphrey) and started calling it the Mall of America Field. All the time.

Now, I’m sure that there is an excuse for this. The deal was made, the Mall of America invested in naming rights and thereafter the Free Press was required to use that name because they are required to attend to corporate interests. Nothing anti-civil rights, anti-DFL, anti-Humphrey going on here. Just the press being bought off by a major corporation. Go on home, folks, nothing to see here. Business as usual.

And all that is the subtle, nuanced, unspoken context in which the Vikings fired Chris Kluwe. Kluwe, one of the world’s greatest punters ever and in his prime, was one of those players who allowed people like me, who are marginally interested in football but unhappy about certain aspects of the game, to see hope. Kluwe tweeted, and his tweets were often … well, smart, and even progressive. He was also repressed. He once tweeted about how dangerous it might be to play on a solid-frozen open field not prepped for winter play (after the HHH Metrodome collapsed under snow one day). He was told to shut up. He tweeted that too. Eventually he tweeted about the gay marriage amendment, and in fact joined the political movement to defeat the amendment. In short, Kluwe did things that football players were not supposed to do: Think, speak, opinionate, not be a right wing bible-thumping shit.

Chris Kluwe was fired by the vikings because of his gay rights activism. He posted about it in a piece called “I Was An NFL Player Until I Was Fired By Two Cowards And A Bigot“:

In May 2013, the Vikings released me from the team. At the time, quite a few people asked me if I thought it was because of my recent activism for same-sex marriage rights, and I was very careful in how I answered the question. My answer, verbatim, was always, “I honestly don’t know, because I’m not in those meetings with the coaches and administrative people.”

This is a true answer. I honestly don’t know if my activism was the reason I got fired.

However, I’m pretty confident it was.

Go read the entire piece. It is rather amazing. This is not a simple situation. The owner of the team seems to have been supportive of Kluwe’s activism. The coach seems to have been swayed to ask Kluwe to STFU, but reluctantly (he is, after all, one of the few African American coaches in the NFL and does not seem like a “pull the ladder up” kind of guy). The real bad guy in this scenario may be Mike Preifer, the special teams coach and thus punter Kluwe’s immediate boss. Preifer is painted by Kluwe as a real dick, telling the player that he’ll burn in hell with the gays and once stating “We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows.” Kluwe notes:

It’s my belief, based on everything that happened over the course of 2012, that I was fired by Mike Priefer, a bigot who didn’t agree with the cause I was working for, and two cowards, Leslie Frazier and Rick Spielman, both of whom knew I was a good punter and would remain a good punter for the foreseeable future, as my numbers over my eight-year career had shown, but who lacked the fortitude to disagree with Mike Priefer on a touchy subject matter.

Also, the Vikings suck. A year or so ago one might have hope that they’d move out of state and we could be rid of them but a new stadium is being built as we speak and they are here to stay. Therefore, they have to change. Hopefully the firing of Chris Kluwe will serve a positive purpose as a turning point. Next, we need to see the firing of Mike Priefer. A person in any management position in any profession in the United States who told his employees the things he said to the Vikings players would be fired. Except in sports, especially football. Sports teams, players, coaches, and owners seem to live in a world where they can be freely racist, anti-gay, and religious bigots. That really has to end.

On today’s radio show, Steve Borsch was talking about the way in which social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is playing out — as an extension of social interaction more than as a new form of shopping mall or marketing environment — and an observation I made a couple of weeks ago during the Vikings game congealed like mucus in the back of your throat when you are getting over a cold (See Pandemonium Looms in Minneapolis). So, since I have a blog, I thought I’d hack it up for you.

Chris Kluwe is the beloved kicker for the Vikings. I don’t really understand football at this level, but in between “possession” the “special” teams come on the field and a kicker kicks the ball so that it lands in a certain spot to the disadvantage of the other team. Apparently, entire games can be won on the basis of this single act, and our man, Kluwe, is widely appreciated as a kicker by vikings fans. So, when he stepped for the first time onto the field during a game being played in inclement Minnesota weather in the University’s open air stadium (the NFL stadium having collapsed under the weight of a 17 inch snow storm), it seemed out of place to hear the fans booing him.

Why were Minnesota fans booing Chris Klewe? Because earlier in the day, he tweeted something that the fans did not want to hear. In fact, what he tweeted was so bad that the NFL overlords demanded that he stop talking about the issue on Twitter, presumably with a threat of being fined, which apparently they can do. The NFL shut him down because of two or three 140 character comments and the fans boo’ed him for what he said. It must have been awful.

In fact, what Chris Klewe said was that the bitter cold of the open air stadium was going to freeze the ground solid, significantly increasing the chances of someone hitting the ground hard and getting a concussion or other serious head injury.

He tweeted:

… all respect to the people that cleared the field and got it ready, you did an amazing job. That being said, its unplayable.

The field is as hard as concrete … and anyone that hits their head is going to get a concussion.

then ..

I’ve been asked not to tweet anymore about the field so as not to distract teammates … and I will honor that.

Then they played the game, and during the first drive, Bret Favre, the Vikings Quarterback, was knocked down, hit his head, got a concussion, and his career ended at that moment.¹

Kluwe was right. And, he was right about something important, and about something that the fans should have been concerned with. And, he was right about a major Minnesota Vikings player getting injured, and the fans had just witnessed the predicted injury before their very eyes, and prior to Kluwe stepping out onto the field for the first time that day.

But, Chris Kluwe apparently also said something negative, though also accurate, about the TCF Bank Stadium, and the stadium was full of fans who were happy to have the stadium available to them, who were enjoying themselves showing off as fans braving the game in horrible weather. They were all dumb-asses, of course. The original stadium, the one that had collapsed, held some 60 thousand people, and as is usually the case with football games, most or all of those seats were sold. The TCF Bank stadium holds some 40 thousand. And, there were only about 25 to 30 thousand at this game. The other fans stayed away, while a subset of them went to see a losing team in a part of town with zero parking at a stadium with no beer (the U does not allow it) in near zero temperatures and snow. So they were the dumbasses. Nonetheless, when the Vikings Quarterback got a concussion by hitting his head on the frozen stadium surface, even the dumbasses should have put two and two together and cheered Chris Kluwe for having spoken truth to power. But no. All they could see was Kluwe dissing the open air stadium, and thus, the fans who were at the game boo’ed him.

So, MY take on social networking: It’s an amplifier and a new venue. Social networking is a place where technology can facilitate additional opportunities for people to be morons in a very public and spectacular way. Like the men who can’t back down from a misogynist argument in which they advocate for rape (we’ve had a couple of those idiotic conversations recently in my Facebook community), the special subset of sports fans who are, well, “special” I guess, are able to make asses of themselves in new and spectacular ways.

I hope they name a helmet after Chris Kluwe.

¹Probably. That may or may not have been his last game anyway, but the concussion put him off the field for the rest of that game, he’s not been back, and as I write this the Vikings are playing the last game of the season without him.