Homophobia at Halftime
If you’re not one to keep up on sports (like me), you probably don’t know this man pictured above. I didn’t know who he was either until some comments he made earlier this week started making headlines. This man is Chris Culliver and he is a player for the San Francisco 49ers. Instead of gearing up for the Superbowl on Sunday, Mr. Culliver has brought it upon himself to share his thoughts on homosexuality with the world. Here’s what he had to say:
“I don’t do the gay guys man. I don’t do that. No, we don’t got no gay people on the team, they gotta get up out of here if they do. Can’t be with that sweet stuff. Nah…can’t be…in the locker room man. Nah.
In addition to a clear lack of respect for grammar, it seems Mr. Culliver has no problem expressing his homophobia in public. If you look at the facts, there has never been an openly gay NFL player in the history of the league. Now, the NFL was founded in 1920, so does that mean that in more than 90 years there have been no gay football players on any of the NFL teams? Of course not. I definitely think that attitudes lie Chris Culliver’s contribute to the lack of openly gay players. If I was a gay football player I probably wouldn’t come out to my team for fear of persecution or violence.
It’s sad that there may be players who are in the NFL or aspiring to play football as a career who can’t fully embrace who they are for fear of people like Culliver. Homophobia in sports is such a big issue and it’s one that tends to be overlooked. As of now Chris Culliver has offered a half-assed apology in which he claims that the comments he made were, “a reflection of thoughts in my head, but they are not how I feel” As if that makes any sense, it’s also a bold-faced lie. His apology is just to save face and doesn’t even touch on the more severe issue at hand. That there is a culture of homophobia within sports and it is not only accepted but encouraged.
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Blog Assessments
Here are my strongest Passion posts:
Love is Louder than the Pressure to be Perfect
And my strongest RCL posts:
For the Passion posts that I chose I believe that these are the most important for a very specific reason. This reason has to do with the overlying themes brought up in the posts. One post deals with the idolization of celebrities and the other is the issue of body image in not only celebrities but normal people as well. In both posts I tried to go deeper than just summarizing the big story in celebrity news for that week. The Bald for Bieber post not only placed the blame of extreme idolization of celebrities on parents but our society as a whole. My Lady Gaga post took the issue of body image and focued it on someone who you may not have thought struggled with issues such as Bulimia and Anorexia. I wanted to provide a forum for discussion on serious topics that re not always at the forefronts of our minds. From the content of the posts and also the comments left by others I think that I can safely say that the posts did what they were supposed to do.
For my RCL posts I think I took public events (Do the Right Thing event, Gangnam style phenomenon) and posed the necessary questions needed to analyze these things in order to provide relevant and stimulating discussion. For the Do the Right Thing post I expressed my views on the movie and subsequent Q&A session and I raised topics that may have been sensitive in nature but necessary. I did the same thing for my Gangnam Style post. What I talked about was met with dissention from a few people and provided an opportunity for people not only in our class but ariund the country to look at their actions concerning the video and maybe come to a realization that it was not all innocent.
Read MoreCopyright Questions
Here are my questions about copyright law…
1) Is there really a legitimate way to regulate fair use? No one can accurately pinpoint when and where an idea was conceived
2) Can copyright laws ever be alleviated?
Read MoreThe Makings of a Public Controversy
An issue becomes a “public controversy” depending on how much people react to it. Nothing becomes controversial without people and their differing opinions and an issue doesn’t become public without a multitude of people with opinions pertaining to the topic. Determining if an issue is public has a lot to do with the media. Media plays an integral part in the lives of everyday people. Just watching the morning news, one can find out all of the hot topics currently circulating in the world. For this reason, the media is probably the biggest way an issue becomes a “public controversy”. Another way of determining what makes an issue “public” is how people react to them. Public controversy usually merit a certain level of outrage among people. The last component of a public controversy is its staying power. Most of these issues are things that someone remembers over a long period power of time. For instance, when I grow older I will still remember the issues of gay marriage, healthcare and so on.
Read MoreMy Very First Voting Experience
Like all of the other freshman at this school, this election was my first experience with voting. The excitement on campus about the election culminated in the most anxious day of this month so far: election day. Unfortunately, I decided to vote through absentee ballot so I missed the experience of actually using a voting machine. I woke up on Tuesday anxious about the election and it only got worse as I watched the coverage in my room with a group of friends. Someone should have filmed me as I screamed at the TV, ranted to my mother, and almost had a conniption when I thought that Romney had won New Jersey.
This is the first time that I have been actively involved in the process of the election and politics as a whole. I have had many intelligent conversations with a host of people concerning the debates, the candidates, and the issues of this election. I think that this election has provided a great opportunity to exercise one’s civic duty and continue to do so in later years. Through this election I have seen rhetoric working in good and bad ways. The slander I have seen among some politicians is such an abuse of rhetoric and only hinders the opportunity for a fair rhetoric platform.
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