The Washington Post’s Kent Babb is one of those sports reporters who has to impose secular-progressive politics on the sports world, which he perceives as backward. Last spring, he was pushing for “inclusion” into the NFL for gay football player Michael Sam: “If Sam is not on an active roster when the season begins in early September, there’s likely to be much more discussion about whether America itself is more accepting of gays than its sports teams.”
On the front of Sunday's sports section, Babb lamented there’s “No separation of church, college football in the South.” He summarized that "To many, the merging of cultural forces feels natural; to others, the most stark instances are uncomfortable — maybe even inappropriate." Babb began with Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze:
Sometimes the passions occupy too much of the same space, causing friction. Some religious leaders worry that football in some ways could be replacing churches: crowds in cathedral-like stadiums the new congregation, the all-knowing coach seen as pastor, prayers offered up for one more big play....
Others worry that men such as Freeze, powerful coaches at state-funded schools, are abusing their influence by pushing their beliefs on young men who want nothing more than to please the man sitting in the back of the room. “That’s something a university shouldn’t be doing,” says Patrick Elliott, a staff attorney with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which earlier this year sent a letter to Clemson criticizing how its football program promotes Christianity.
Freeze says his program must be a reflection of himself, of his beliefs, of his place in the world. And he is a man of God, the South and football — almighty one and all. “We’re unapologetic,” he says, “about who we are.”
The pull quote on the back page came from the atheist attorney: “This practice coerces player...to enter a Christian house of worship, lest they speak up against their superiors.”
The story carries suggestive subheadlines about “Conversion or coercion,” and “Faith as a sales pitch.” There was outrage that at Clemson, wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins requested to be baptized, and an “ice tub was hauled onto a Clemson practice field, land for by state taxpayers and filled with water.” Church-state separationists obsess over the particulars. The coach later realized that the baptism would have been less controversial if he’d been “baptized in a waterway that runs near the practice fields rather than a university-owned tub.”
Naturally, Babb doesn’t see the state requiring indoctrination in the opposite of Christianity as a problem – as the state imposing its moral beliefs upon religious Americans, so when public schools are required to teach “gay history” and “gender spectrum diversity training,” there is no “freedom from” crusades in the press worrying about anyone’s rights being violated.
The Post didn’t sound the alarm last fall about state-endorsed indoctrination when Ole Miss football players were accused of using the gay F-bomb at a performance of “The Laramie Project,” a demagogic pro-gay play about the killing of Matthew Shepard. The university’s Bias Incident Response Team responded by insisting the entire audience would be required to go through an "educational dialogue session led by university faculty and allies."
According to the Post, religion is a creed that should be scraped off the public school like an old piece of bubble gum on your shoe. Secular progressivism is a creed that should be drilled into young minds.
