A meditation on mindless bigotry this meditative Sunday ...

The good thing about mindless bigotry is that these days people feel empowered to speak out against the bigots.

This could be a tricky thing in the old days, especially when confronted by blind, simple-minded prejudice like this:

His thoughts? Well they turn out to be a dose of Xian fundamentalism:

Apparently Newcastle Knights footballer Ryan Stig had been hanging around with the Luis Palau mob, and in the usual way learned that Christ's message isn't love so much as hate ... here he is doing a promo for Cityfest, which on the surface seems to nothing much to do with religion...

Palau, who has his own website, here, is one of those disagreeable tele and radio evangelists who infest the downtime in the media, and he specialises in the queasy condescension and evasive dog-whistling that infests Stig's message to the world.

Now when a thugby leaguer offers his views on gays and homosexuality and Satan, all sorts of people are on hand to deal with the twaddle of a man who parrots the Christian line, while taking to the field to pummel people.

And instead of predictable piece in the Star Observer - not that there's anything wrong with that - what a relief to see the Fairfaxians give space to sports writer Andrew Webster and his piece How Michael Kirby saved my life.

Given that professional football remains a haven for bigotry and homophobia - go on, name one AFL footballer who's dared to come out - Webster's piece will no doubt make him a target for the sniggerers and the snide guardians of homophobia, but it's good to see someone writing from the heart.

It seems there's been an outbreak of mindless bigotry in sports in recent times, with Anthony Mundine also deciding to join Stig in creating a stir:

Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve?

It's just so lame, and now so venerable and aged, the feeble joke has whiskers on it.

It's been recited by so many parrots so many times, it now has its own wiki, Adam and Steve.

As a smack down, it's got as much heft as the pathetic attempt to stage Mundine's last fight, which saw Mundine's opponent get the sulks about not scoring the right amount of cash in the paw, hopping on the plane and flying off before a punch was landed.

And it set up Mundine's notorious glass jaw up for a predictable counter-punch:

The pond suspects that there was, as usual, a whiff of religion in the mix.

Some time ago, Mundine converted to Islam, proclaiming it as a new faith for Kooris, and it seems he still carries around in his head a mix of Xian and Islamic fundamentalist attitudes to gays.

How else to explain his use of that old evangelical joke?

It's a reminder how fundamentalists of all stripes can weave the magic of bigotry and prejudice into the warp of thick-headed sports professionals ...

Actor Luke Carroll joined in the debate:

Each to their bloody own, alright.

Now it so happens the pond has nothing against professional sportspeople who are paid to think with their muscles, and who routinely have no time to spare to exercise their brain. 

Why the pond has even shaken the paw of Anthony Mundine - how it came to pass was one of those passing weird coincidences that make up life - back in the salad days, when he was surrounded by admiring indigenous fans, all trying to press the flesh, touch the hem.

Now he's on the slide and delivering low blows on social media as a way of filling in his time, and all he can look forward to is a good pummelling of the kind delivered by Rachel Perkins:

"I've known Aboriginal activists throughout the '60s and '70s and '80s and '90s who fought for the cause of Aboriginal people and they are gay," she said. "
[Mundine] saying gay people and Aboriginality don't go together denies all of the identity of those people. It's insulting to them - it's inappropriate that he says that." (more here)

Yep, the pond knows plenty of gay Aboriginal people - one worked at the child care centre used by the pond, and in those days no one thought tuppence of leaving a child with a man who did nothing to cop this kind of generic slur from Mundine.

It's remarkable the way that some Aboriginal people, themselves routinely demonised, think so little of demonising their own gay kind ... let alone others who are gay ...

As always, the pond blames it all on mindless religious bigotry, which means there's a couple of thousand years of solid indoctrination of Jews and Christians in mindless bigotry that needs to be unpicked and unstitched. Even though it's about as substantial and as meaningful as Jewish-inspired bigotry towards bacon, shellfish, and mixed cloth, it runs deep and hard ...

Throw in a thousand plus years of Islamic thinking, which inherited the Abrahamic prejudices, and there you go, thugby league and boxing and cauliflower eared thinking lives on, and not a thought as to some interesting by-ways in indigenous culture ...

What, for example, would Mundine make of the Samoan tradition of Fa'afafine? Talk to a Samoan and they'll swear blind that it's got nothing to do with 'gay', but anthropologists have a field day with what it actually means.

In Australia, it's quite likely that some aboriginal tribes used terms like "two-one" to accept that two spirits could live within the one person ... a bit like the Two-Spirit mixed gender roles allowed in North American tribes ...

There's no need to go all Margaret Mead about the tolerance of indigenous people, or join her critics in getting agitated about the notion of casual sex, all that's needed is to mourn the way history gets obscured by prejudice and ignorance ...

Well it's likely that Mundine is going to have more time on his hands in the future, and no doubt will want to play a positive role in his community. Let's hope he has a little time for reading and reflection, and less time for shit that doesn't need to fly ...