wfn.org | Rocker For Congress

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

31-January-2000 
00049 
 
    Rocker For Congress 
 
    Commentary by Andrew M. Greeley 
    Religion News Service 
 
CHICAGO - John Rocker is a baseball player of some considerable talent who 
is now in the deep muddy because of comments he made to a sportswriter 
while riding around New York City as to why he would not want to live 
there. 
 
    He doesn't seem to want to be around gays, foreigners, immigrants, 
blacks, and folks of other hue.  I will not judge whether Mr. Rocker is a 
bigot, but his remarks certainly sound like bigotry. 
 
    If he is a bigot, he's not a very bright one because he trusted a 
journalist, almost always a mistake and especially if it's a sports 
journalist. 
 
    Exactly why the American people need to know about Rocker's prejudices 
is not immediately obvious.  I'm inclined to suspect the writer tricked him 
into making the comments which caused his team to send him off for 
psychiatric counseling because of "public outrage." 
 
    I have not, incidentally, heard any public outrage except from the 
folks whose job it is to express outrage and from sports columnists -- 
folks who are some of the most vicious human beings in all the world. 
 
    Most people I suspect don't care what a baseball player says or does so 
long as he performs with some skill on the field.  Nor can I imagine that 
anyone seriously believes that a baseball player's nutty ideas have any 
impact on anyone else.  Who cares what he thinks? 
 
    More to the point, bigots have the right to express their opinions, 
however misguided they may be.  A bigot, even a bigoted baseball player, 
does not lose his right to freedom of speech. 
 
    Rocker is a role model?  Gimme a break.  No one believes that about 
athletes any more. Rocker is simply another victim to the media-driven 
feeding frenzy that periodically occurs when a celebrity says something 
politically incorrect.  We must gather round him in a ritual and cast him 
into the darkness outside without paying any attention to the possibility 
the opinions he expresses are in fact American public policy. 
 
    So if John Rocker is banned from baseball and is seeking another 
career, I suggest he run for Congress on the Republican ticket because he 
will feel right at home with the evangelical bigots who currently dominate 
Congress. 
 
    They don't like foreigners either, especially foreigners with a skin 
color that is not pure white.  They don't like gays and want to keep them 
out of the military.  They especially don't like Chinese.  They have passed 
some of the most vile laws in our history to punish immigrants. 
 
    Has anyone suggested their opinions, expressed in somewhat more genteel 
language but substantially the same as Rocker's, should drive them to a 
psychiatrist's couch? 
 
    Moreover, his sentiments on gays and immigrants are supported by large 
majorities of American citizens who articulate them with impunity in daily 
life outside the circles where such sentiments are inhibited by the 
guardians of what is politically correct. 
 
    Our immigration policy, enacted by the Republican Congress and 
enthusiastically supported by the American people, deliberately breaks up 
families and is applied with astonishing cruelty.  It is not only vile, it 
is stupid. 
 
    One walks up and down a street and through a mall and sees "help 
wanted" signs everywhere.  If the current prosperity continues, there will 
be more such signs.  We desperately need immigrants if a labor shortage is 
not going to generate inflation. 
 
    Europe, it has been reported, will need 35 million foreign workers if 
it is to sustain its present economic growth through the next 20 years. 
Some observers think Europeans will forego economic growth if the cost is 
more foreigners ruining their ethnic purity. 
 
    We laugh at their stupidity but we are embarked on exactly the same 
policy.  It is not a question of whether the United States can absorb more 
immigrants; the question is how can we do without them. 
 
    Patently I make no case for John Rocker's bigotry.  And no case either 
for those hypocrites who pretend to be shocked about it while they ignore 
the fact that similar opinions are the position of the Congress of the 
United States and the American people. 
 
    John Rocker, it seems, is an all-American. 

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