They're not right about your rights

As football training camps open, we find that people who choose to discriminate and make ridiculous statements about others are already in mid-season form, forcing the rest of us to double up on our intake of slurs and innuendoes, just to stay up with the dumb utterances of people such as Lauren Cox and Tony Dungy, the latter of whom I used to respect a lot.

We start with Mrs Cox, the wife of a man with the greatest job in the world, save for Charlie Watts, the drummer for the Rolling Stones.  Morgan Cox is the Ravens' long snapper, which means that he gets a good sideline seat for all the games and only has to get off the bench when there's a kick coming - a field goal, extra point or punt.  When called upon, he uses his natural ability to hunch over and hike a football backwards from between his legs, to the holder or punter a few yards back. Then he blocks opponents as needed and goes back to the seat he only recently vacated and watches the rest of the game, or eats a hot dog, or whatever.

Cox is married to the former Lauren Bell, who writes a blog she calls "The Nomad Notepad."  You might expect that she would write about how great it is to have plenty of money, good health and all the advantages of living in prosperity, but nooooooooo! Last week, she chose to complain about the ESPY awards, and how Drake was making jokes about athletes fooling around with loose women. She was aghast that anyone would make a joke about such things!  Why, she has “shed tears with so many friends over the issue Drake mocked tonight”!

Maybe your friends need to choose better husbands, is all I'm saying.

She writes like a high school kid who just found out about Pearl Harbor ("Some may think that the families of these players just disappear from August to January while our men are hard at work providing your entertainment as we eat our Thanksgiving meals alone, but you are extremely mistaken.") Poor Lauren, pickin' at a wishbone while trying to scrape by on the $630,000 salary her husband makes.  

And speaking of Pearl Harbor, she makes an inapt comparison when she says that Michael Sam is like Hitler and the 9/11 terrorists, because Sam, who only wants to be an NFL player and an out gay man at the same time, believes he is doing what he has the right to do, and so did Hitler as he killed "hundreds of thousands of people" (only off by about 5.5 million there, Lauren) and so did the Twin Towers murderers.  Anyone who believes they are doing the right thing winds up in the same sin bin, to her.

You can read it for yourself if you wish, and even enjoy her unapologetic apology ("I apologize for those that I have have offended") if you want.  You'll think you're back in Creative Writing 11,   I tell you. 

And then Tony Dungy, the former coach and current TV analyst, winds up and opens up his thoughts about how he would not have chosen Michael Sam to play on his team.  "Not because I don't believe Michael Sam should have a chance to play, but I wouldn't want to deal with all of it,” Dungy said.  “It’s not going to be totally smooth … things will happen.’’

Dungy

So many groups, so many individuals, have been kept out of so many things for so many years because "things will happen."  And Dungy is the man appointed by the league to be Michael Vick's personal mentor when Vick got out of prison after serving a sentence for his unspeakable cruelty to animals, and the man who once said he embraced a constitutional amendment making same-sex marriage illegal. 

But in the world where Lauren B. Cox and Tony Dungy live, gay people, Hitler, the 9/11 hijackers and every other sinful thing are all mixed up in this big conspiracy to derail their happy little world where all couples have to be boy-girl and no one gets to live the way THEY want to without checking with the Dungy-Cox Committee On How You Have To Live.