The outrage/offense stuff annoys me as well - you choose to be offended/outraged. It is a conscious decision.
Canât listen to that show anymore - ill informed comment passed off as news. Am I offended. No I just choose to tune out.
Franno has a lot of people dancing to his merry tune.
He was probably half jarred at the time
that âflamboyantâ comment âŚ:D:D
They nearly choked trying to read out the listener feedback they got in favour of Francis
[SIZE=6]The only gay in the village[/SIZE]
on February 23, 2014 3:00 pm /
http://gaeliclife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Picture-17-300x208.png
By Joe Brolly
Last week, Missouri Universityâs All-American defensive end Michael Sam, decided to tell the world that he is gay. Later this year, Sam will become the only openly gay player in the NFL.
The defensive player of the year, playing for the college champions, in the strongest college conference, would normally be a first round draft pick. But because he is homosexual, it is likely he will instead be chosen somewhere between rounds three and five.
A number of high profile players have already said that as a gay man, he wonât be welcome in an NFL locker room. As a homosexual, his endorsement potential is uncertain. The big American Football franchises fear his shirt sales will be sluggish. In 2014, this is how they roll in the Land of the Free.
The United States are not alone. In Englandâs professional and semi-professional soccer leagues, from the premiership all the way down to the regional conferences, guess how many openly gay players there are? One. No, that is not a misprint. His name is Liam Davis and he plays for Gainsborough Trinity in the Western Conference, augmenting his meagre income by running a cafe with his partner Neil in Cleethorpes. Like Michael Sam, Davis is in a minority of one.
I spoke to Alan Milton during the week, Director of Communications with the GAA. He told me there are just over 200,000 adult males playing Gaelic games, mostly in Ireland. Yet at club and county level, there is not a single openly gay footballer. This is in the context of an average of 10 percent of the population being gay. Not a single homosexual Gaelic footballer. Perhaps the genetic make up of the GAA community is unique.
When Cork hurler Donal Ăg Cusack proclaimed his homosexuality several years ago, he was seen as a trailblazer. Feted on The Late Late Show and the daytime chat shows, his warts and all autobiography Come What May became a best seller. It charted a trail of one night stands from Cork to Ho Chi Minh city and offered up one of the immortal lines of recent years. When Cusack told his father he was gay, his father said âLike f*** it Donal Ăg, the abuse youâre going to get about this son. I thought it was hard defending your short puck-outs, but f*** it, this one.â
Turns out, Donal Ăg wasnât blazing a trail at all. He opened a door, but only his brother followed, and that was only after he had retired from the Cork panel. Thing is, there is nothing average about Donal Ăg. Fiercely self confident, charismatic and independent, he also has a fanatical streak. When you are in his company, he burns. One night at a charity function some years ago in Cork Opera House, he got very cross at me during a debate on the GPA. C
oming off stage, I went to shake his hand at which point he threatened to break my nose and had to be held back by some of the organisers. No, Donal Ăg is not the sort of person to suffer in silence. Unlike those many thousands of anonymous gay men pretending to be something theyâre not in club and county changing rooms all over the country.
On Sunday past on Newstalkâs Off the Ball program, the panel were reviewing a similar piece I had written in Sundayâs Irish Mail. Neil Francis, veteran journalist and ex-Irish rugby international, suggested that in the same way he was not interested in ballet, gay men were not interested in sport and that homosexuals tended to be hairdressers rather than sportsmen. For around 20 minutes, he stuck to this theme.
The following night, he went onto Today FMâs Last Word and grovelled, saying he was horrified when he had listened to his words afterwards. He went on to apologise unreservedly. It was an apology borne of political correctness and the need to salvage his media career. As Nigel Owens, the only openly gay rugby referee, put it on the same programme, how could an experienced journalist have said such things in the course of a long interview unless he meant them?
The truth is that Neilâs view is representative of the view of the majority of Irish people. Even people of good intention, who support the notion of equality, are extremely uncomfortable with the reality. Society here believes that being gay is being inferior, which is why homosexuality has been forced underground.
The GAA community is a very close knit one. The plus side of that is great support for our neighbour. The downside is the pressure to conform. When has a gay man ever taken his partner to the club dinner dance or chatted about a one-night stand with another man in the dressing room?
It is little wonder that so many of our young men are prepared to hide their real selves and pretend to be something they are not. It is a simply intolerable state of affairs. Whether a man is sexually attracted to women, or men, or both, is entirely natural. Yet, young people in our community are growing up in an environment that is strongly homophobic. The result is that many of your young men are miserable.
It goes without saying that the Catholic Churchâs attitude to homosexuality is not just homophobic but grotesquely hypocritical, but amazingly, it continues to have traction. In the North, we have the added problem of some political parties who espouse overtly homophobic views. In 2008, Iris Robinson, DUP MP and wife of Northern Irelandâs First Minister, stated in the House of Parliament that homosexuality was, âMore vile than child sex abuse.â
Her colleague Ian Paisley Junior â DUP MP for North Antrim, told a Hot Press journalist in 2008, âGays and lesbians repulse me.â Just last year, attacking the proposal to introduce same sex marriage, Junior said this would lead to the age of consent being reduced and, âAttempts to legalise euthanasia. The morality of the nation is at stake.â
Tom Elliot became the short-lived leader of the UUP in 2010 after he said in the leadership debate that he would never attend, âA gay parade or a GAA match.â You couldnât make it up.
Worryingly, the GAA has no initiative of any kind in place in relation to homophobia. The stated reason is that no one has ever complained about such discrimination. Out of sight and out of mind.
Interestingly, ladies GAA and camogie is not afflicted by this entrenched fear and discrimination. I know a large number of openly gay girls who have the confidence to live their lives without fear and are fully accepted within their clubs and counties. Why should they live a repressed existence? Perhaps women have a more practical and empathetic outlook.
The idiotic and deeply unpleasant idea that being homosexual is somehow less than being heterosexual needs to be laughed out of our games and more importantly, out of our community. Women were treated as inferior for hundreds of years until this scandal was tackled head on. The same applied to the black community and other minority races. The problem with the mainstream gay community is that it is invisible.
The GAA must take the initiative on this. It is high time that we began the process of emancipating this large, suffering minority.
Unless I am entirely wrong and Donal Ăg is the only gay in the GAA village.
Would you think Donal Og and his brother were having sneaky gay sex together down the years while nobody knew? Sure you couldnât put nothing passed them. Would you say so?
Thatâs a lame post, pal. I donât know the two lads but they come across as sound cunts in the media.
I was only asking pal. I donât know for sure, neither do you. Thanks for your opinion., Next.
Did you sign up here looking for tag team extra dick rugby porn? You seem like you did.
There is no need to be offensive.
.
Ban this cunt.
Whatâs offensive about your taste for rugby players?
Leave him alone Farmer. I think what heâs trying to tell us is that he has sneaky sex with his sister.
Peter G will sort him outâŚif he ever comes back.
@The Dublin Bay Prawn?
I avoid issuing bans for posters being utter gimps as that would have raised the thorny issue of whether I should ban myself (@artfoley style). Instead I advocate ridiculing this clown for his stale, unfunny, boring attempted cheap shot at the two chaps from Cork.
I was mainly trying to make a statement to the clown that such stuff is not tolerated on here.
the tax cheat tried to rip us the people off?
file under obnoxious Cork cunt