By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — How society has been thrown for a loop was on display April 3 at the sharp downtown arena where the Phoenix Suns NBA franchise plays. On the official program was honor for sexual confusion and dysfunction as the Suns observed their Pride Night.
It was a long toss from when the 1968 expansion Suns first played at the concave-roofed Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, looking somewhat like a big saddle, at the state fairgrounds, northwest of downtown Phoenix. Back then, values were just, you know, so square.
On April 4, the number-two story on the front sports page of the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic, the state’s largest daily, was headlined, “Suns celebrate equality, inclusion.” Inclusion of whom? Why, “the LGBT community.”
The first 5,000 fans at the arena received a free shirt with a rainbow Suns logo, said the story, which presented a quotation with an echo effect about “embracing everyone . . . really cool . . . embrace everyone . . . really cool.”
The story reported that during a panel discussion before the night’s game, fans were tutored on correct thoughts. “The discussion ranged from what the sports community can still do to foster acceptance to how Arizona legislation compares to other states.”
Said the Republic scribe: “The NBA has been progressive on a number of social issues, with players taking on roles of advocacy.”
Readers were further enlightened that NBA rookies after the summer draft are instructed “with regards to homophobic language and sexist language in the locker room.”
Remember back when progressives would complain that the beauty of Olympics sports was being tainted with politics and nationalism? That must have been before they decided to put on their own boxing gloves to slug the public.
As the left continues to politicize everything, even sports have been tossed into the furnace to melt down old ways for remolding. Enjoy yourself with time off? Not at all; duty calls! Society is lock-stepped into more groupthink. Why might this make you think of Communist or National Socialist sports events?
Pro football became a place to attack not opposing linemen but America itself, no matter how opposed fans were to this. Now Joe Schmoe gets the going-over before getting to watch the game of hoops played by “player-advocates.”
Remember back when you could be both a good Catholic and a “good American” in the eyes of the legal system, without having to hush your conscience?
When moral traditionalists dared resist leftist aggressions, probably beginning back after the U.S. Supreme Court imposed nationwide permissive abortion overnight in 1973, they had been called “culture warriors” when they didn’t surrender immediately. This was followed by such saturation bombings as the onslaught for “same-sex marriage.”
But the leftists who launched the battles in the first place, only on the strength of their inner ravings, weren’t called warriors at all. Are farmers called “warriors” when they just plant their beautiful seeds for a necessary harvest? Of course not. They’re just friends of the Earth, preparing the soil.
If the soil is soiled pretty much the same way from coast to coast in today’s media, it wasn’t always so. There had to be pioneers.
Randy Lovely had been doing his spadework at the Republic before he moved up Gannett’s USA Today ladder. Back in January 2008, the Queerty site reported:
“It’s a big day for veteran reporter Randy Lovely. The openly homo-journo has accepted the top slot at Gannett’s Arizona Republic, which he joined back in 2002. Lovely can now call himself the top gay editor in all the land — well, in the United States, at least.”
Readers saw the Republic taking an interest in covering what interested Lovely personally. The same way that dominant U.S. media generally reflect the fever dreams of secular “progressives,” from Maine to Hawaii.
Abortion on demand throughout pregnancy may be as repulsive to ordinary humans as live dissection of other unwilling victims, but media biggies will be the first to let you know that the last thing they aspire to be is “ordinary humans.” Look at The New York Times smacking its lips day after day on “news” pages for unlimited, unending abortion.
Leila Miller, an Arizona Catholic author and speaker, told The Wanderer in an April 9 email:
“Anyone who takes the time to look will see that the ‘gay rights’ movement has not risen up from the grass roots, as was the case in the 1960s civil-rights movement. Quite the opposite! It was imposed on us by our ‘betters’ — the secular leftist ‘progressive’ elites in our universities, our legislatures, our courts, Hollywood, the arts, and even big-business and social-media giants.
“This was top-down imposition by design, not a clamoring of average Americans for innate human rights. It’s been said that a nation can survive its people doing evil things, but a nation cannot survive its people calling evil good,” Miller said.
“If we don’t resist this frantic, frenzied, and even violent demand that we immediately embrace and celebrate the things we knew to be immoral just a few years ago, we will keep sliding further from God’s created order and into darkness,” she said. “Normalizing grave sin and teaching it to our children has the enemy licking his chops.
“Catholics must recognize the spiritual battle that underlies the temporal one, and act. I specifically call on men, and on fathers, to stop acquiescing to the LGBTQ agenda, and to start speaking truth to power. Our truth is Christ, and the powers we face are spiritual,” Miller said.
A half-century ago, when the expansion Suns began basketball play in Phoenix in 1968, former Chicagoan Jerry Colangelo, born in 1939, made the big jump to sign on as the team’s general manager, becoming the youngest GM in professional sports.
Colangelo grew into a sports and business powerhouse in Phoenix and even owned the Suns for a while. He wasn’t bashful about admitting to religious faith.
Looking back on his life, the Christian Broadcasting Network sat down with Colangelo, who said in part:
“In basketball, people knew where I stood. They knew that I was an outspoken Christian and what I believed in. In life you have to continually focus on what really is important and what your priorities are. The first priority in life is to have that relationship with Jesus Christ. So your faith is number one.”
Faith in something is still big at the Suns. But what gets the honors today likely would have given Colangelo a heart attack back in 1968.
However, even heart attacks don’t have to be fatal. Here’s hoping for morally healthier hooping it up in the future.
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