Why sports industry sides with transgenders – WND.com

Alas, we cant even go to the bathroom in peace. The Texas Legislature is considering a law similar to the so-called bathroom bill of North Carolina, mandating that people use bathrooms and locker rooms matching their biological gender. While it is astonishing that we even need such a law, nevertheless, similar to the North Carolina boycott, the NFL is threatening to block future Super Bowl games from being held in Texas if the Lone Star State goes through with such legislation.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is having none of this nonsense, tweeting in Trump-like fashion: NFL decision makers also benched Tom Brady last season. It ended with NFL handing the Super Bowl trophy to Brady. In other words, there are forces here at play that are a lot bigger than you, NFL commissioner.

And Abbott has a point; Why would the NFL care what Texas does with its bathrooms? And why would the NFL take up a cause that has nothing to do with its customer base, the vast majority of which come from the Midwest and South who could care less about transgender politics?

One would think the NFL would have learned from their drop in ratings due to Colin Kaepernick and the national anthem controversy. There is, however, a rather clear rationale for why the NFL and other sports leagues are insisting on a corporate solidarity with transgenders, and it finds its origins in globalization and sports journalism.

Considered the defining trait of modernity, globalization involves what is in effect a worldwide transnational economic system held together by telecommunications and technology. What is crucial for us to observe is that globalization involves a social dynamic known as disembedding, which is a propelling of social and economic factors away from localized control toward more transnational processes. For example, think of your local mall: In one sense, the mass shopping complex is in fact local in terms of its proximity to consumers; but notice that the retail outlets that comprise the various stores at a mall are not local but rather national and international chains and brand names. This is especially the case with the latest releases at the movie theater or the offerings at the food court.

However, it is not merely economic processes that are arrested from provincial control; such dislodging also involves localized customs, traditions, languages and religions. Whereas premodern societies are characterized generally by provincial beliefs and practices considered sacred and absolute, globalized societies offer a range of consumer-based options that call into question the sanctity of local beliefs and practices, relativizing them to a global food court of many other creedal alternatives.

This social order of consumer-based options tends to forge a new conception of the human person as a sovereign individual who exercises control over his or her own life circumstances. Again, traditional social structures and arrangements are generally fixed in terms of key identity markers such as gender, sexual orientation and religious affiliation. But globalized societies, because of the wide array of options, see this fixedness as restrictive. And so traditional morals and customs tend to give way to what we called lifestyle values. Lifestyle values operate according to a plurality of what sociologist Peter Berger defines as life-worlds, wherein each individual practices whatever belief system he or she deems most plausible. These belief systems include everything from religious identity to gender identity.

Thus, lifestyle values and identities are defined and determined by consumerist tendencies and norms. Commercial advertising is not merely central to economic growth, it is also of central influence to inventing the self through offering variant lifestyle features and choices. I would therefore argue that corporations such as the NFL promising to boycott Texas are not so much for LGBT rights as they are against arbitrarily restricting lifestyle options, since such limitations are deemed inconsistent with a society that includes consumer-based self-expression.

Along with globalization is the pressure from sports journalists, who are notoriously liberal. This comes largely from journalisms secular turn at the beginning of the 20th century, when they adopted scientific rationalism as a method for so-called objective reporting, that is, one based on verified facts and data irrespective of the journalists personal biases and preconceptions.

However, scientific rationalism erects new boundaries of knowledge that effectively censor religions, traditions, customs and cultures from the realm of what can be known. Indeed, scientific facts are considered objective precisely because they transcend the biases and prejudices innate to cultural values and norms. And so what emerges from this pre-commitment to scientific rationalism is what has been called a fact/value dichotomy: Facts are objective while values are subjective, facts apply to all while values apply only to some. Thus, as the journalist transforms into an impartial observer of economic, political and social events, he or she begins to view moral and religious sensibilities in terms of you guessed it! personal lifestyle values that are relative to individuals or cultures. Today, virtually every media outlet features prominently a Lifestyles section where we can learn about everything from the sex habits of entertainers to our horoscopes.

And so, globalization and liberal sports journalism together reimagine sports as an expression of consumer-based lifestyle values. Under their auspice, the human person has been redefined as a mere consumer, a chooser of lifestyle identities, and nothing more. In this sense, the transgender community has more in common with the dominant beliefs of the NFL than do traditionalists.

Its time for sports fans to realize that the NFL couldnt care less about their traditional values and customs, but have rather embraced, along with so many of its reporters, economic- and media-based biases that are thoroughly anti-traditional and anti-cultural.

Perhaps the real boycott is about to begin.

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Why sports industry sides with transgenders - WND.com