Gary Seymour, sports@wolfrivermedia.com
Apart from its aversion to whistle the traveling and carrying violation, the National Basketball Association would like to be known as the organization that makes the right call.
The league bounced one of its owners a couple of years ago when he was revealed to have made racist remarks to his girlfriend.
Most recently, the NBA demonstrated that intolerance is something it will not tolerate, as it announced that the 2017 All-Star weekend would be held somewhere other than the originally scheduled site of Charlotte.
The move came as a counter to the passing of North Carolina’s “bathroom law,” the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, which requires people using public bathrooms that correspond to the gender on their birth certificate.
The state law, which passed in a special session last March, also cut back local ordinances that protected lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual people and eliminated anti-discrimination ordinances statewide.
The law was passed in response to a Charlotte ordinance that allowed transgender students to use a bathroom consistent with their gender identity.
Predictably, the NBA’s announcement generated immediate reaction and controversy.
Gender-fluid supporters readily cheered the NBA’s decision to move the game out of North Carolina, noting that for too long the LGBT community has been ostracized, vilified and castigated for pursuing an “unnatural” lifestyle that is perfectly natural to them.
Those of a more gender-viscous leaning insist that using the washroom corresponding to one’s original gender is just common sense. They say that allowing one to declare gender identity opens the door to potential abuse, and fear that it could lead to a procession of phone camera-toting deviates dressed for the occasion.
The NBA says it hopes to reschedule the game and the weekend activities to Charlotte in 2019.
How effective a maneuver the rescheduling is remains to be seen, and it’s hard to know exactly who is being punished. None of the Hornets roster or front office had a say in the passing of the bill, and the majority of NBA fans in the Tar Heel State are not members of the North Carolina General Assembly.
As of this writing, there has been no movement to suspend any of the upcoming 41 home games scheduled at Charlotte’s Time Warner Cable Arena, where the NBA will draw ticket, advertising, merchandising and concession revenues.
The league will also continue to make money broadcasting its product in countries that do not prohibit gender-identity discrimination.
Rather than using the All-Star Game as a forum to bring grass-roots heat to North Carolina legislators, the NBA set a murky precedent and opened itself up to charges of hypocrisy.
With our 24-hour news cycle and a daily crisis sweeping yesterday’s urgency off the cover page, long memories are not in great supply today.
A better strategy might have been to keep the game in Charlotte as scheduled and use the weekend exhibition as a forum for a non-stop hammering home of the point they are purporting to be making.
Then, they could trot out all the athletes, musicians and other pop culture figures seeking to make their voices heard in support of LGBT inclusion. They could use the weekend as a springboard to full-court pressing the local Congress critters to reconsider the legislation.
As it sits, the 2017 weekend will be held elsewhere, with New York, Chicago and New Orleans having been mentioned as possible replacement sites. By that time, today’s passionate discontent over North Carolina’s law may have faded, and the well-intentioned league will have missed an opportunity to make a real impact.