Bob CollinsIn case you haven’t gotten enough Chris Kluwe, NPR put him on the air this afternoon.
This time, though, they put him on with Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo, whom Kluwe was defending in his letter.
Kluwe ducked the question of whether any teammates objected to his letter. At first he said he’s gotten plenty of support. Pressed further he said, “there were obviously concerns about it being a distraction to the team.”
Meanwhile, the New Yorker laments that Kluwe is now the story, instead of Ayanbadejo.
For the past three years, Brendon Ayanbadejo, a backup linebacker and standout special-teams player for the Ravens, has been advocating for same-sex marriage–writing about it, talking about it, appearing as one of the stars of a video campaign launched by backers of a measure to legalize it in Maryland. It’s not his day job, but he’s gotten enough attention for it that an anti-gay-marriage Maryland state legislator wrote to the owner of the Ravens and demanded that he shut Ayanbadejo up.
Enter the Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, who came to Ayanbadejo’s defense with a vitriolic but quite enjoyable rant published on the sports blog Deadspin. And now Ayanbadejo is no longer the story–sure, he’d done the harder work, but he never used the words “lustful cock-monster.” Admittedly, Ayanbadejo is still getting mentioned in the stories about the whole dustup, but a careful reader will see what’s going on–Kluwe is the lead of the story; Ayanbadejo only gets noticed when the writer stops to fill in the details. (For the record, Kluwe has done his own advocacy for same-sex marriage in his home state.)
You may think that this is the paranoia of the homer, a cry of bias from someone who’s just looking for reason to feel slighted. And you may be right.
That’s pretty much the sum and substance of it. The rest of the article — the majority, actually — is about some football game.
