Former NFL player, head coach and current television football analyst Tony Dungy has found himself in a bit of a pickle over comments that he made regarding St. Louis Rams rookie defensive lineman Michael Sam who is gay. Dungy, a man who wears his religion on his sleeve came under fire for his statement that were he still an NFL head coach that he would not have drafted Sam, a former University of Missouri All American who came out as being gay back in February prior to May's draft where he was taken in the seventh and last round by the Rams. Dungy, who rocketed to national fame as the coach who managed to do the unthinkable and turn around the perpetually putrid Tampa Bay Buccaneers into a winning team and who later won a Super Bowl with the Indianapolis Colts before ending up on network sports television slipped up like so many other pious bigots and let his true feelings get out.
In an story published in the Tampa Tribune - a town where Dungy is still treated like the coming of the messiah he was quoted as I excerpt:
"I wouldn't have taken him,'' said former Bucs and Colts coach Tony Dungy, now an analyst for NBC. "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."It's not going to be totally smooth " things will happen.''
Despite being placed on a media created pedestal as though he was some exalted moral authority Dungy must have been stunned at the backlash to his ill-advised comments and immediately threw the Rapture bus into reverse, leaving smoking rubber in his wake.
Dungy's "clarification" only further illustrates the hypocrisy of the man, one which is rampant among the most vocal adherents of the bastardized bible of chicken-fried, militarized American Christianity where the it was the money changers who ran Jesus's long-haired hippie ass out of the temple and stole his words for their blasphemous prosperity gospel. According to an ESPN story what the canonized Dungy really meant was:
"I do not believe Michael's sexual orientation will be a distraction to his teammates or his organization. I do, however, believe that the media attention that comes with it will be a distraction."
Which is total horseshit because when the Tim Tebow traveling salvation show was a hit a few years back with the "distraction" nearly tearing apart the Denver Broncos to the point where the former Florida Gator and religious icon who some - and I kid you not -were comparing to the earthly resurrection of Christ, it was Dungy who was one of Tebow's most steadfast advocates although the man couldn't accurately throw a football into the ocean eight out of ten times if he was standing knee deep in the surf. So much for the "distraction" hogwash, it was a brief moment when a charlatan was revealed for all to see. This isn't the first time that Dungy has found himself in trouble for anti-gay sentiments, in 2007 he endorsed a same-sex marriage ban backed by one of those all too prevalent so-called Christian hate groups called the Indiana Family Institute.
You know, the real Jesus hated hypocrites, probably as much as Dungy and his ilk hate gays although unlike the more honest members of the flock the former coach and television celebrity hides it very well. Jesus had not one word to say about homosexuality and for all that is known may have even been gay himself being that he only hung around with a pack of dudes and according the immutable word of God in the bible never consorted with a member of the opposite sex. The purveyors of the same snake oil that Jesus warned about - that of the pharisees and false-prophets are cunning in being able to cloak their savage, very un-Christlike hatred in the cloak of scripture that they have bastardized to reinforce their own narrow-minded intolerance.
Keith Olbermann may have been run out of MSNBC where he had a good run of trashing hypocrites and liars during the Bush-Cheney years, ceding the stage to sleazy Obama apologists like Rachel Maddow but he roasted the man that the media has spent years selling as being able to walk on water as just another one of the liars and swine who have helped to piss on everything that this once great country at one time - at least in theory - stood for. Here is a small part of Olbermann's already classic skewering of Dungy:
"I wouldn't want to deal with it, things will happen,' is remarkably similar to what football coaches and owners said until 1946 about players who looked like Tony Dungy. And it's remarkably similar to what NFL owners said until 1989 about guys who wanted to become NFL head coaches who look like Tony Dungy."
So Tony Dungy is a fake and a sanctimonious horse's ass as well. He was always a fraud in Tampa Bay where despite a defense stocked with future hall of fame players like Warren Sapp, Derrick Brooks and John Lynch his teams could never get over the hump due to his stubborn refusal to accept what all but the willfully blind could see - that his quarterbacks stank. Dungy was run out of town after a crushing playoff humiliation by the Philadelphia Eagles in which with his job on the line, the team quit on him. He also only managed to win but one Super Bowl during his seven year stint as head coach of the Indianapolis Colts with record-shattering Peyton Manning in his prime. The performance of Manning (who just can't shake the choker label) during the butt-ugly 43-8 stomping of the "scared" Denver Broncos by the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl takes a bit of the taint off of Dungy's legacy but the fact is that he consistently underachieved as a coach and owes his national prominence largely to media hype.
Don't count on him falling from grace too much over his remarks about Michael Sam, the public relations and damage control teams are already frantically working to polish his halo. As for the general hypocrisy of the new breed of American Christianity that has risen to dominance by largely purging liberal voices from the flock - I learned at a young age the extent to which those practicing it were fakes and easily duped good folks whose trust and goodwill were exploited by con artists and political opportunists.
Back in the 1970's one of our local Baptist churches used to troll the neighborhood looking for potential converts to be the subjects of their brainwashing sessions or as it was formally known "Sunday School". Once the pickup lists had been drawn up the gaily colored church bus would be sent out to pick up the hapless and impressionable victims. My poor sister and I were like many other children conscripted out of our parents desire for peace and quiet and maybe some coveted whoopee time.
The cheery old lady who was in charge of the festivities while we were on the bus would lead us in chants and song of a a 'biblical' nature and I will never forget the day when the song happened to be one of those silly-assed rhymes that are so adored by the Christian Right. We sang - "you can't get to heaven with roller skates, because you'll roll right past those pearly gates", a verse or two later it became "you can't get to Heaven with hippie hair because the lord don't like that mess up there". I didn't sing but only looked on in a youthful recognition of the hypocrisy that in my now middle-aged years would come to be so dominant in the USA!, USA! USA!.
While she was singing this, banging on a tambourine for cadence, she was standing in front of a mural of a man with a scraggly beard and hair that rolled way down past his shoulders, maybe even to his buttocks..and it sure as fuck wasn't Ted Nugent.
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