21st  CENTURY HEADLINES: Being Heterosexual Was Her Biggest Hurdle. Now for the Rebound.

About to be the first female basketball player inducted into San Diego’s sports hall of fame, Candice Wiggins wanted to make a strong statement for the next generation. She sat down with her hometown paper to speak her truth to her community. It did not go according to plan.

The former WNBA star alleged in a fateful February 2017 interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune that her heterosexual orientation and popularity caused her to be bullied throughout her professional career. Her romantic preference for men, and the accompanying locker room headaches, was the “biggest hurdle of my career.” The kicker: “I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay,” Wiggins said at the time. “It was a conformist type of place. There was a whole different set of rules.”

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The backlash was deafening. Some players, like Atlanta Dream center Imani Boyette, said they understood Wiggins’ concerns but were disappointed in her drastic overstatement. Others went the route of character assassination. The point guard’s college coach landed somewhere in between. “I don’t know that math was ever Candice’s strength,” Tara VanDerveer told the San Francisco Chronicle. “That to me sounds homophobic and negative.”

Wiggins admits that “98 percent” was “just what it felt like to me,” and she has since avoided the topic. “I knew it was painful, but it was my personal story, not the ultimate truth. My priority was helping people understand why I left,” she says. And Wiggins maintains that she has heard from supporters in private. “No one likes to discuss it because it’s such a private point of view,” she says. “One girl who had a much less successful career than me reached out and thanked me for speaking out. She was disappointed in her career.… That doesn’t make me happy, but it does make me content.”

Why are Democrat-monopoly institutions such cesspits of bigotry and oikophobia?