Yeeper wrote:
i believe i absolutely understand the argument you're making, and i understand its merits. but you don't understand the argument we're making. i can't imagine what each of us might learn if one of the arguments made is just not understood. and i can't imagine what might be written to help you better understand it. first you must want to understand it. you don't have to agree with it. but if you have no interest in understanding it, we're sort of at an impasse.
I'm not trying to be obtuse by any means. I apologize if its come off that way. I also have no dog in this fight, other than I want a clean and fun race opportunity.
I do want to understand the issue. I consider myself a man of principle, and I like to know the reasons for certain things. So my real question for this whole debate is what makes discriminated groups different? Or more importantly what makes one more deserving of rights than another? Thats all I'm asking.
If it helps, I would be asking the same questions and playing the same devil's advocate if it was religion that was being argued, but not sex, or politics. Or if it was people with brown hair, but not blue hair or red hair. Do you see what I'm saying? Effectively, there is argument for support of one discriminated class, while at the same time saying that another discriminated class doesn't deserve the same support. Its confusing to me.
let me see if i can distill this. religions come and go. tribes come and go. (any goths out there? is there a pictish triathlon club?) there are 3 groups of people who
don't come and go - who, throughout history, just about everywhere, with few exceptions, are harangued, diminished, looked on with disdain or are the subjects of violence: women; physically disabled; and those we're considering now. we have identified 2 of those groups in sport and have said to the world, no, you cannot disenfranchise these. that is, you can disenfranchise them in your country for 364 days. just not during that day when we come into your country to produce a race.
you will never see the NFL or the NBA or the ITU write or say a damned thing about "propaganda" regarding challenged athletes or women. you'll see pink armbands, shoes, shoelaces, headbands. and rightly so. and no, it's not because it's cancer. it's because it's a specific cancer that predominantly afflicts our women. we have chosen to champion and lift up 2 of the 3 historic groups that need specific help.
yes, if you are gay, you may participate in a triathlon. if you remain silent. invisible. closeted. if you make double darn sure that we don't know you're gay, then you may participate. this is the insidiousness of it. we do absolutely nothing, zero, to let the world know that here, in triathlon, there's a safe harbor for the LGBT community. and because one person, once, in an ITU race, flew a rainbow flag at the finish of an AG race, we've now come up with THIS rule, which doesn't say "don't fly a flag." it says, be careful of the color of your shoelaces. too much color? DQ. rainbow sticker on your bike's top tube? DQ. you may say that no, the rule doesn't say that. really? reread the rule.
what i want is for a gay man to come to a triathlon and know that he's found a safe harbor. we need to make
special protections for him. we need to send a
special invitation to him. because we made a
special effort to let us know how much he
wasn't wanted throughout history (and i mean up to the very recent history, and still today). we've made it mandatory that he stay silent. we need to cure that. this is our gap to close.
here is what i *think* i have learned as president of our industry group, traveling around talking to people in groups not represented sufficiently in triathlon (black, hispanic, women, gay, gen-y, etc.). it's not enough for the old white men to invite young white men. or women. or gay or black people. into triathlon. women need to invite women. black people need to invite black people. and so forth. this is what
works. we need to empower people who aren't us (white men) to invite people in their cohort. men don't empower women. women empower women. men just need to get out of the way.
how do you allow LGBT community members to empower each other? invite each other? let each other know this is where you'll find safe harbor? how does this rule do that? how do we do that in spite of this rule? you tell me.
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman
