don't quit, don't even quit.

This fall I went to a Bruins pre-season game with some out-of-town friends who are Rangers fans. Despite their best efforts, my understanding and appreciation of hockey remains a … work in progress. One of them linked to this article, which includes a really honest self-examination of homophobia and straight privilege in professional sports.

What I believe is that Curt Schilling was a very talented right-handed pitcher and this talent contributed to several very happy memories that I will treasure until the day I die. I also believe that his positions on civil rights issues such as same-sex marriage are 1) wrong 2) wishy-washy 3) self-contradictory 4) morally abhorrent.

When I write about sports on the internet, I sometimes think, “What am I doing? Do I have anything to say that isn’t being said somewhere else, in a way that’s more funny, with better statistics and superior image macros?” If I was trying to carve out a semi-unique niche for myself, it would be about my experience as an ultra-liberal mega-politicized queer person working in the field of social justice who comes home every night and spends three hours watching a game played by 25 guys who would probably deny me basic civil liberties as soon as they’d scratch their left nut.

But that’s just so fucking depressing, you know? I love baseball, and sometimes I’m not even sure how I have managed to root for Mike Timlin and Julian Tavarez and still respect myself in the morning.

When Curt Schilling retired from professional baseball, I said said that I thought he was kind of a jerk but that he had given me a magical once-in-a-lifetime experience as a sports fan, and that I would always be grateful for that. I don’t want to spend the next five months listening to him campaign on the principle that he would best represent our state by not representing me. I don’t even have a good, articulate reason. I just don’t.