So, if you bet good money on the Flintstones being used this weekend in an incredibly lame political analogy involving gays and the NFL…I salute you. For that exact thing happened on the Saturday edition of the “Melissa Harris-Perry Show,” when The Nation’s Dave Zirin discussed the suspension handed down to New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., who received unsportsmanlike conduct penalties and was, allegedly, the target of gay slurs before the game.
Zirin went all Stone Age with his analogy for the NFL’s handling of issues involving gay players. Bedrock, specifically:
“In the NFL, on LGBT issues, they’re less progressive than the Flintstones. They are antediluvian on this stuff and any effort they try to say otherwise is ridiculous. They don’t do any kind of trainings, any kind of talk. They don’t do anything the NBA does to try to say to players, ‘Wait a minute, gayness is not trash talk. You cannot do that.'”
A somewhat large problem with all this, is the fact that there is absolutely no evidence that Beckham was the victim of any “gay trash talk.” Yeah, the Giants said they believed Beckham had been attacked with gay slurs.
However, the NFL apparently wasn’t overwhelmingly impressed with whatever evidence the Giants had based that conclusion on. Because soon after the Giants made those statements, the NFL released the results of their investigation, which showed “no evidence” that anyone made any gay remarks to Beckham.
Which means the Giants tweets were more likely than not the result of the team wanting to stand by their best player. In addition to recognizing they make their home in one of the largest gay communities in the world.
In other words, they were politically motivated statements absent any truth or support in evidence. Kind of like what Dave Zirin does.
