Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Oh the irony of it all. There’s Tim Hardaway, former National Basketball Association All-Star, who happens to be African-American, sounding off about gays. “I hate gay people. I’m homophobic.” If he found one on his team, he allowed, he would ask to have him traded, or lacking that, ask to be traded himself. My-oh-my, shades of the appropriately named Fred “Dixie” Walker, racist and star right fielder for the 1940s Brooklyn Dodgers. When Jackie Robinson came to the Dodgers training camp in the spring of 1947, Walker reacted in much the same way. Robinson, of course, became an All-Star and opened the gates for every African-American player since. Walker, along with every other racist on the team, was shut down by the true Southern gentleman and Kentucky colonel Harold “Pee Wee” Reese.
Now here’s Hardaway, saying in effect, it wouldn’t matter who he was and what he could do on the court, I would hate a gay pro basketball player just because of who he is, by his nature, not by anything he ever did. Sound familiar, followers of white supremacy? Fortunately, although he is out of the game now, the NBA immediately uninvited Hardaway from its own All-Star game and celebration this weekend.
But how did Hardaway get that way? Just like racism, homophobia is not in-born. It is taught. So widely taught as it is in this country, it is rampant even amongst the most discriminated-against group of people in American history. That should come as no surprise. In this decade, we need look no further than the Christian Right and its political party, otherwise known as the Republicans. Under Karl Rove’s leadership, the latter have made homophobia its prime wedge issue of the decade. Christian Rightist leader James Dobson never tires of running the lie that homosexuality is a matter of choice, as if skin color (as, by the way, Rush Limbaugh now tells us about Obama) were. Trent Lott, when he was the Senate Majority Leader (he is now only the Deputy Minority Leader), told us that homosexuality is a sin because the Bible says it is. And Karl Rove has never tired of running state Homosexual Second Class Citizenship Constitutional amendments (misidentified to be about “gay marriage”) when it will help him to win elections. The Christian Right and the Republican Party have mobilized homophobia and taken it into the political wars. So indeed it should be no surprise that someone like Tim Hardaway, African-American or no, just vocalizes it, out loud.
Originally published on BuzzFlash on Fri, 02/16/2007 – 1:25pm. http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/048
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY), a weekly contributing author for The Political Junkies, and contributing editor for The Moving Planet Blog.
