Odds and Ends

Here are just a few stories I found floating through the interwebz this week ...

Inoke Tonga, a volleyball coach from Valor Christian High School in Colorado, says the school administration told him to convert to being straight and “denounce being gay” or lose his job. Tonga, who is gay and Christian, was called into a meeting with school administrators last month, thinking that he was up for a promotion, until he was asked this:

“Did you ever post anything about identifying as a gay man or advocating for the LGBT community?”

Tonga happily said ‘Yes,’ because he wanted to stand up for gay people, but that didn’t make the administrators happy.

“Well how do you think that reflects on the school? You’re a danger to put in front of the kids.”

That meeting went on for about an hour and a half and Tonga says that he didn’t advocate more for himself because he thought he was there for a promotion, not a public shaming. As he was leaving, an administrator offered him some “kind of conversion books” and said:

“When you are ready to accept our help—we’re not holding this coaching position over your head, but when you’re ready to denounce being gay and accept our help to become a child of God, then you can have your position back.”

Tonga refused and, the next day the administration emailed the volleyball players and their parents saying he had chosen to leave because he’s “struggling with a spiritual battle.”

No, he was told to leave his job because he’s gay.

After nearly a decade in the NFL, Buffalo Bills wide receiver Cole Beasley saw his fame skyrocket in recent months, though not because he’s such a talented player—of that I have no idea and don’t care—but because of his anti-vaxxing stance.

And then this week, as the Buffalo Bills hosted the Pittsburgh Steelers, Cole Beasley dropped a pass in the first quarter, and Twitter was ready with jeers and heckles to mock the receiver.

It would seem that Cole cannot catch the virus and he cannot catch a football. COVIDIOT.

That bigot who is credited as the architect of Texas’ abortion ban, and would like to see Roe v Wade overturned, Jonathan Mitchell, says the Supreme Court’s inaction on that Texas law has opened the door for other “lawless” rights and protections to be reversed … as in the right to have gay sex and the right to same-sex marriage.

Mitchell says that while it was not necessary for the high court to immediately overrule the legal cases that enshrine those rights—Lawrence v Texas, which outlawed criminal sanctions against people who engaged in gay sex, and Obergefell v Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage—those cases are just “as lawless as Roe.”

And to be fair, this is an absurd interpretation, but it’s all in Mitchell’s brief, as is the case of Loving v Virginia, which ended racial discrimination in marriage.

Keep in mind that one of the justices who gladly jumped on Mitchell’s antiwomen, anti-choice, anti-abortion law is one Clarence Thomas, a black man married to a white woman.

I wonder how Thomas will feel if and when Mitchell comes for his marriage?

Recently Grady Knox, a  Tennessee high school student , was advocating for a mask mandate in schools during the public comment section at a Rutherford County Board of Education meeting and spoke about his grandmother who died of COVID-19 last year:

“This time last year, my grandmother, who was a former teacher at the Rutherford County school system died of COVID because someone wasn’t wearing a mask.”

And as he continued to speak, several adults …adults … behind him began to laugh and shake their heads; at one point, someone in the background can be heard screaming, “shut up!”

The heckling continued until Coy Young, the school board chairman stepped in:

“Hey guys, we’re here to act professional.”

Adults, laughing at the story of a woman dying of COVID.

Another ‘Karen’ bites the dust, y’all. In a recent viral video a woman dubbed “Coughing Karen” followed, and coughed, on a masked mother and daughter in a Lincoln, Nebraska Super Saver grocery store because … COVIDIOT.

And then, within a matter of days, social media did its thing and the woman was identified as Janene Hoskovec, an employee of SAP, a software company based in Germany.

And within hours, SAP posted a response on Twitter, writing that the company was “taking the matter of an SAP employee incident very seriously” and that an investigation was underway. That same day, SAP announced that Janene Hoskovec, AKA “Coughing Karen” was terminated from their employ.

Bye Karen.