The bleak moral judgments continued to come on Wednesday, with a public defenestration of those individuals who, for reasons no one else's concern, don't want to walk onto the football field wearing a rainbow message.
Manchester United's Noussair Mazraoui is a practicing Muslim who has been reluctant to stand up for an LGBTQ cause not related to his religion. That's why he announced before Sunday's match against Everton that a new piece of rainbow-branded Adidas merchandise – a 'walk-on jacket', as they call it – wasn't for him.
United felt a storm, saw how the cameras and the watching world would be fixated on the one player who wouldn't step onto the pitch dressed in this jacket, and decided that none of their players would walk out wearing such a jacket.
The stack started about an hour after that became known. The supporters of United's Rainbow Devils 'respected' Mazraoui's views, but did not so much accept his right not to wear a jacket.
“He had put the rest of the team in a position where they felt they couldn't carry their jackets,” they said. There would be a 'negative effect on any player who struggles with their sexuality.'
It was a statement to make your heart sink. A demonstration of the very intolerance that the Rainbow Laces campaign supposedly aimed to eradicate.
The rainbow was once a beautiful emblem of sporting inclusivity – all creeds, all colours. Think of Ellis Park Stadium, Johannesburg, June 1995 and a South African country finally freed from intolerance and becoming the 'rainbow nation' that lifts the Rugby World Cup.
Yet here were nameless people speaking in its name and denigrating a footballer who had not spoken ill of anyone. Don't they see how incredibly attractive that looks? Don't they see that they are sticking a dagger in the heart of their company?
It is the place where we seem to have arrived. Expressing the desire not to wear a coat carries great danger in this day and age. Accusations of intolerance and bigotry from those who simply will not tolerate behavior outside the parameters they alone prescribe.
At the basis of all this is the gestural politics that wearing a rainbow has become. What started as a powerful, progressive fight for inclusivity and compassion has become an exercise in PR fascism, with all attention focused on those who would rather not join the cozy, homogeneous, pre-agreed worldview and feel damned for it. .
In desperation, Ipswich Town's Sam Morsy was demonized for leaving his rainbow armband in the dressing room. But the FA possibly filing charges against Crystal Palace's Marc Guehi for stenciling 'Jesus loves you' on his own armband sent us straight into the depths.
Guehi, the son of an evangelical minister, still sometimes plays drums at the church in Lewisham, south-east London, where his father will preach the same message as clergy across the country this Advent. 'Jesus loves you' will certainly be discussed. But not all Christian education has modern 'Western' tolerance at its core.
The three words that Guehi signed on his tape were the message of an individual who, with that upbringing at his core, could not simply meekly walk the path that others told him to follow.
The anger caused by these episodes has turned into a more general culture war drowning in its own hypocrisy. A landscape in which the requirement to wear certain emblems is apparently more justified than others.
For example, Wrexham's Irish full-back James McClean was vilified last month for refusing to wear a poppy or interact with teammates for a pre-match silence during Remembrance weekend. The attacks on that player were no less disgusting. No one has the right force to force an Irishman into what he has always regarded as an act of reflection before the army of another country.
But the farce of Guehi being punished for his message at Christmas should be the line in the sand that banishes these virtue-signalling bandwagons from a sporting world in which they have no place.
Somewhere along the line, football seems to have forgotten the blanket ban on slogans imposed by the FA's International Football Association Board in 2014, recognizing that the impossibility of making moral judgments about what messages are acceptable in a sport governed by so many people are played countries and cultures.
Someone pointed out yesterday during the latest storm that there are 64 different nationalities represented in the Premier League, as well as numerous denominations. How does football expect such a wide range of perspectives to embrace the rainbow message as one coherent whole?
The FA are drowning in the same imbalance they found last year when they lit up Wembley in the colors of Ukraine, yet decided not to light the Wembley arch in the colors of Israel, after the atrocities committed there by Hamas two weeks earlier .
There was also, of course, the Premier League's affiliation with Black Lives Matters, an organization that pursued such extreme goals as defunding the police.
To speak for those who have chosen not to wear the rainbow bracelet is to risk illiberalism and cancellation. But I write with the life-affirming experience of interviewing Liam Davis in mind.
When he and I spoke ten years ago, he was a 23-year-old playing for Gainsborough Trinity in the Conference North – the kind of environment that can be very inhospitable, as dressing rooms are often populated by people less familiar with the melting pot of large urban communities and clubs in the countryside, where diversity and tolerance develop more slowly.
Liam told how he revealed he was gay during a conversation with the club's veteran goalkeeper, becoming the first person in British professional or semi-professional football to come out. It was hard not to be moved by his quiet determination and articulation, which laughed at bigotry.
Testimonials like Liam's have slowly helped push inclusivity to the point where a homophobic outburst would not be tolerated in most football stands today. Individuals like him are the real torchbearers.
During this summer's European Championship it was noted how many members of the England team had deep faith. Bukayo Saka grew up in a devout Christian household in Ealing, west London, and attended a Pentecostal church in Uxbridge. Eberchi Eze said his own Christian faith was “hugely important.” Ivan Toney wore his faith on his back, with a large tattoo of the Ten Commandments.
We didn't know what religion everyone was brought up with and we had no right to know – any more than those running a slick PR campaign that has done very well in football have the right to dictate to players what bracelets and jackets to wear. How dare they? Why do they think they have the right?
Comments