“The players will not play on Thursday and we accept their decision,” Hasler said. “These young men are strong in their beliefs and convictions and we will give them the space and support they require.
remove them from your team, make cancel culture real I beg of you :trans-gun:
the favorite sport of br*tish boarding school nonces that just banned trans people from participating has queerphobic players? :surprised-pika:
Rugby union is the one that copies boarding school shit, rugby league is more of a poorer people’s sport in Aus. Also, most of the players in this boycott are of Islander or Maori descent. In Australia a large portion of homophobic/anti LGBTQIA+ people are immigrants from strict religious backgrounds. As @KiaKaha said, for Pacific Islanders this is a remnant of them being colonised. But it is so ingrained now that there are several evangelical christian churches owned and run by people of Islander background where they echo everything the white evangelical christians in USA talk about.
To be fair it’s not really the Brits that are against it. A while ago Israel Folau was homophobic and the rugby world clowned on him for it. Rugby Union’s had openly gay legends of the sport for quite some time now. The players that are going against it at the moment are mostly from similar ilk as Folau, being indigenous but raised Catholic probably in a Catholic school
Here’s a take I saw on Folau that made me pause for a bit.
Missing from the public discourse is the background of how evangelical Christianity swept the Pacific Islands. This the story of colonialism and Christian missionaries and Captain Cook; of the destruction of local religions and languages.
It is the story of how all over the world, cultures that didn’t have laws or customs against homosexuality or gender fluidity could become so puritanical that they turned against their own LGBTIQ brethren in favour of the gospel as preached by their colonisers; only for the colonisers to then finally soften their own stances against homosexuality and decide that homophobia was yet another moral failing of the colonised. *
I still don’t like him, but there’s a grain of truth in it.
