Media Calls To Ban Christian Schools From NCAA Tournament
Media Calls To Ban Christian Schools From NCAA Tournament
By Mason Beasler
Last week I read an article about the Catholic Church refusing to bless same-sex weddings since these unions are outside God’s biblical design for marriage.
That’s it. That was the whole article.
This of course was nothing new, but sometimes the progressive media experiences an uncontrollable itch to remind everyone just how politically incorrect a conservative body truly is.
And since the Oral Roberts University men’s basketball team (seeded a lowly #15 in the NCAA tournament) has beaten #2 seed Ohio State and #7 seed Florida, it’s now time to conduct the same redundant opposition as last week’s bout with the Vatican.
Because ORU holds the biblical standard for marriage, sexuality, and gender, ORU must be canceled too, at least according to the press.
USA Today posted an article by Hemal Jhaveri calling for a complete ban of ORU from the tournament.
“The fact is,” Jhaveri writes, “any and all anti-LGBTQ+ language in any school’s policies should ban them from NCAA competition.”
Like the Catholic Church, ORU’s policies surrounding gay marriage have long been known, understood, and rejected by the progressive culture at large.
The only development warranting a mid-March puff piece from the left was ORU’s success in the NCAA tournament.
After toppling two mammoth athletic programs in Ohio State and Florida, ORU was quickly dubbed the “Cinderella story” for this year’s tournament. In 2020, Ohio State enrolled 67,957 students, while Florida enrolled 57,841.
In 2020 Oral Roberts recorded a 12th year of enrollment growth, enrolling a whopping 4,300 students.
Suddenly, the previously-underestimated Golden Eagles of ORU were the center of discussion in much of the sports world. And the left can’t have that.
To call what Jhaveri wrote for USA Today a “news article” would be akin to labeling a 4-year-old’s tirade as a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.
Jhaveri simply strung a bunch of politically correct buzzwords and insults together, slapped her name on it, and hit send. Throughout her tirade, she labels ORU with all the typical politically correct phrases, such as “deeply bigoted,” “exclusionary fundamentalism,” “institutional transphobia,” “moral regressiveness,” and so on.
A broken, intolerant record stuck on repeat.
The progressive institutions and media groups of our day claim to support tolerance for everyone. Everyone except those who disagree with them, of course.
For those rebellious and religious weirdos who won’t conform to the liberal party line, nothing less than total cancellation will suffice.
Oddly enough, Jhaveri even slips in a rather odd dig at ORU, calling their basketball players “unpaid student athletes.”
Unless Jhaveri knows something the rest of us don’t, the entirety of student-athletes are, under NCAA mandate, prohibited from financial compensation by their respective universities.
Laughably so, Jhaveri is now resorting to pointing out a quality that applies to the American student-athlete body as a whole, with the intention of demeaning only ORU’s student-athletes.
Can you sense the desperation?
The triumph of a Christian university over other secular universities was wholly unexpected, and simply cannot be tolerated, resulting in the attack on ORU on secular news sites.
Note that the opposition and slandering of ORU and its policies didn’t ramp up until they started winning big games. The public outcry to ban ORU from competing didn’t burst onto the scene until the Golden Eagles found themselves in the spotlight of the Sweet 16.
Of course, we’ve seen this before from the progressive camp. Jack Phillips, the Christian baker from Colorado, (the one who’s already been sued several times for refusing to bake a cake celebrating gay marriage) is once again being taken to court. This time, he refused to bake a cake that would celebrate a gender transition.
In other words, Phillips has been repeatedly sued for exercising his First Amendment rights.
If you oppose the Left’s progressive stances, and you’re garnering attention while doing it, be prepared for them to throw the book at you, calling you every name in it. They will sue, cancel, ban, defame – whatever it takes to silence you.
Because at the root of this liberal agenda is one that is entirely intolerant of differing beliefs, an agenda that has been enraged and intensified with each of ORU’s tournament victories.
I guess you could say that, in the end, progressives rejecting any view but their own is, as the Catholic Church story, old news as well.