BRUCE BAWER: Diving Into a Pool of PC.
Some people are foolish enough to take their political cues from show-business celebrities like Bette Midler, Rob Reiner, and Cher. Not me. I listen to athletes. So when I heard that 28-year-old British diver Tom Daley had made a documentary about the current status of human rights in certain former British colonies, I sought it out at once.
Just in case you didn’t know, Daley won a gold medal at the 2020 Olympics. He’s also come in first at the Commonwealth Games no fewer than four times. The premise of his documentary, Illegal to Be Me, is that, as this year’s Commonwealth Games approached (they were held in Birmingham between July 28 and Aug. 8), he began to think about the fact that, in 35 of the 56 countries competing in the games, it’s illegal to be gay. In three of those countries, homosexuality is punishable by death.
In some of Nigeria’s northern states, he informs us, the penalty for homosexuality is death by stoning. He doesn’t explain why this is the case in the north but not the south. Want to guess?
Daley says that since he himself is gay — he came out in 2013 — and has competed all over the Commonwealth, these statistics give him a queasy feeling. He’s won medals in some of those 35 anti-gay countries: How, he asks, should he feel about those medals? The anti-gay laws also pique his historical curiosity — where did all this hatred come from? — and make him want to “get the sporting world to try to change things.”
His tentative goal, he tells us at the outset of the documentary — which aired on BBC One on Aug. 9 — is to persuade Commonwealth Games officials to deny countries with anti-gay laws the right to host the Commonwealth Games. But he realizes that this stratagem may be misguided. “I still have so much to learn,” he admits. So he travels to a couple of the anti-gay Commonwealth countries to “meet some queer athletes,” see how they live, and bounce his ideas off them.
First up is Pakistan…
Ellipses mine. It’s the BBC, so I think you can see where this is going, but read the whole thing, nonetheless. If Netflix teamed up Daley with Colin Kaepernick to host a series, the level of wokeness and blinkered PC-thinking would likely implode the universe.
Speaking of the latter athlete turned woke activist: Adam Schefter Shoots Down Kaepernick to the Cleveland Browns Rumor: NFL World Reacts.
I think the author may have misspelled “yawns” at the end of that headline.