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Rainbow Pride


rajncajn
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I see what you're saying & I'm assuming that was mostly a tounge-in-cheek statement, but just in case, there is obviously a HUGE difference in posting anonymously on a message board where your impact is very minimal and you're giving your opinion to a like-minded peer group and broadcasting your opinion through the media every chance you get when you are someone in his position.

 

 

I just don't get why you (or others) would complain about someone's advocacy for any particular issue, especially since I wouldn't have any idea about Chris Kluwe's advocacy of this particular issue except for the fact that you brought everyone's attention to it.

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I see what you're saying & I'm assuming that was mostly a tounge-in-cheek statement, but just in case, there is obviously a HUGE difference in posting anonymously on a message board where your impact is very minimal and you're giving your opinion to a like-minded peer group and broadcasting your opinion through the media every chance you get when you are someone in his position.

 

Exactly, any chicken-chight can post anonymously on a message board. It actually takes stones to do what this guy does.
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Exactly, any chicken-chight can post anonymously on a message board. It actually takes stones to do what this guy does.

 

 

Wow... thanks. I'll keep that in mind.

 

Please excuse my momentary lapse of juvenile humor then. We all know that isn't tolerated here.

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Wow... thanks. I'll keep that in mind.

 

Please excuse my momentary lapse of juvenile humor then. We all know that isn't tolerated here.

That's not the point. But rather that it seems funny that you feel it's somehow OK for any of us to express our opinions here but that someone with more exposure should check himself.

 

The chicken chight bit was not implying that you are, but rather, that it doesn't take any sack at all for any of us to come here and say what we say.

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First off, good for him. I've always liked his outspoken ways.

 

Secondly, who knew he was dreamier than Tom Brady. That's the first time I've seen a picture of him. If I were a girl I'd bang him.

 

 

:lol:

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That's not the point. But rather that it seems funny that you feel it's somehow OK for any of us to express our opinions here but that someone with more exposure should check himself.

Like I said, expressing your opinion to a peer group is a lot different than just putting it out in the media from someone in his position. I don't see how the two can be compared. He's using his name, or in this case his sexuality, in order to inflect his opinions on a broad audience and influence their opinion, I'm telling a handful of friends on a message board mine. It's hardly the same.

 

That's not to say I disagree with the message he is purveying in this case, I just don't buy that his main concern is whatever cause he may be fighting for & that mostly comes from his methods for me. Maybe people do like him because he is outspoken, but to me, that only draws attention to himself and not whatever it is he's supposedly fighting for.

 

The chicken chight bit was not implying that you are, but rather, that it doesn't take any sack at all for any of us to come here and say what we say.

 

 

Well, maybe for you, but I happen to value the opinions of a lot of the folks here & I try my best to carry myself on the boards and portray the same values as I do in person. So I do think it is difficult at times to stand up for something you believe in, even if it goes against the general thinking. That's the whole reason I gave Bier props earlier for doing just that.

 

As for Kluwe, I don't think it really takes all that much for someone who, I think, craves attention to do something like posing in a gay mag. I'm glad that maybe it does raise a little awareness, but I disagree on how much. After all, what is it that we are talking about in this thread? It's certainly not anything about Gay Rights, so where actually is the attention being focused?

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Like I said, expressing your opinion to a peer group is a lot different than just putting it out in the media from someone in his position. I don't see how the two can be compared. He's using his name, or in this case his sexuality, in order to inflect his opinions on a broad audience and influence their opinion, I'm telling a handful of friends on a message board mine. It's hardly the same.

 

That's not to say I disagree with the message he is purveying in this case, I just don't buy that his main concern is whatever cause he may be fighting for & that mostly comes from his methods for me. Maybe people do like him because he is outspoken, but to me, that only draws attention to himself and not whatever it is he's supposedly fighting for.

 

 

 

Well, maybe for you, but I happen to value the opinions of a lot of the folks here & I try my best to carry myself on the boards and portray the same values as I do in person. So I do think it is difficult at times to stand up for something you believe in, even if it goes against the general thinking. That's the whole reason I gave Bier props earlier for doing just that.

 

As for Kluwe, I don't think it really takes all that much for someone who, I think, craves attention to do something like posing in a gay mag. I'm glad that maybe it does raise a little awareness, but I disagree on how much. After all, what is it that we are talking about in this thread? It's certainly not anything about Gay Rights, so where actually is the attention being focused?

 

I'm not saying that people portray themselves as different than they are. Rather, none of us are laying it out like he is in this case.

 

I could say the exact same things he's been saying. And, well, actually, I have, and it's just some dude in NC saying that on a message board. No biggie either way.

 

Not so for him. Keep in mind, that the NFL has not historically been entirely progressive in this regard. Any gay players certainly kept it to themselves, so even something like this could cause the guy some grief.

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I've just rarely encountered someone as devoid of a sarcasm meter as you.

 

You need to have a thick skin here. Actually that used to be the case, now you just need to have a clue. Actually no, now you just need to, I don't know, like watching things go down in flames? :shrug:

 

I digress. Stop taking everything so literally, especially yourself. Observe how others practice self-deprecation, sarcasm, nuance, plays on words, ironic homoerotic jokes, all of that. If you don't think a post belongs in a certain forum, try to just move on. If the detlefs and bronco billys bore you to tears, learn to scan past their posts. Take the telephone pole out of your ass, go get laid, smoke a bowl, lighten up, have fun. You're the uptightest motherSNICKERSer here and thus a juicy target for bored CHEETOs like me.

 

But for real, I nailed SheikYerbuti like he owed me money, and he was amazing.

 

I hope all of this helps you.

 

 

Gee thanks for all the help. I'll go home and try to follow as much of your advice as possible. Not sure about the telephone poll bit, its up there pretty far and kind of feels nice, so I may leave that in a while longer.

 

Honestly I thought you were trying to explain something with me with all the back and forth, so I was trying to understand what you were saying. I know now to just accept that every post you make is a silly joke and has no real meaning, at least when you're talking to me. So I'll try to ignore it, or just laugh it off.

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Me thinks ol' Steve is FB friends with Matt's wife. Maybe even the Viqueens punter too

 

 

Not on FB, I've got real friends I see and talk to in person ;)

 

I know I'm probably one of the last 5 people in the world not on FB (or so the media and all those who love FB would have us believe).

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If you've made it this far into this thread, then this is probably worth reading:

 

The Punter Makes His Point

The New York Times

By TONY GERVINO

Published: October 19, 2012

 

MINNEAPOLIS — It was a Saturday night in early October, and the temperature was below freezing. A half-hour before team curfew, Chris Kluwe, the Minnesota Vikings’ punter and an unlikely voice of the national debate on same-sex marriage, was polishing off a family-size box of Gobstopper candy, reluctant to leave band practice.

 

Earlier, while driving to rehearsal at a wasp-infested warehouse in a dicey north Minneapolis neighborhood, Kluwe said, “Football is what I do for a living, but it’s not even remotely who I am.”

 

Despite the unseasonably frigid air, he wore a World of Warcraft baseball cap backward, a Nice Vibe T-shirt, low-slung jeans and sandals.

 

“I only wear shoes when it’s absolutely necessary,” said Kluwe, who grew up in California. “Otherwise, it’s sandals or, when I’m forced to, boots.”

 

Kluwe might look to some like an undercover cop trying to pass as a college student. He fits right in. His bandmates in Tripping Icarus — an energetic four-piece rock group that Kluwe was enlisted to join mainly because of his prowess on the video game Guitar Hero (true story) — ended the session with a typical flurry of insults. They seized on Kluwe’s recent shirtless photos in a magazine and his decidedly uneven singing voice. A scruffy-haired 30-year-old, he took it in stride and grinned, his mouth filled with sugar.

 

When he is under assault, Kluwe is clearly in his element.

 

In late August, the Maryland state delegate Emmett C. Burns Jr. wrote to the Baltimore Ravens’ owner, Steve Bisciotti, urging him to silence linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo. Ayanbadejo had been supporting the state’s Civil Marriage Protection Act, which will allow gay couples to obtain a civil marriage license beginning Jan. 1 if it passes a Nov. 6 referendum. Burns asked Bisciotti to “inhibit such expressions from your employee and that he be ordered to cease and desist such injurious actions.”

 

“I know of no other N.F.L. player who has done what Mr. Ayambadejo is doing,” Burns wrote, misspelling Ayanbadejo’s surname.

 

Nine days later, at 11:30 p.m. in the master bedroom of the modest Savage, Minn., home that Kluwe shares with his wife, Isabel, and daughters, Olivia, 4, and Remy, 2, Kluwe came across Burns’s dispatch while surfing the Web.

 

“So I’m lying in bed, and I keep thinking over and over about this letter, and I’m like, ‘I can’t fall asleep,’ ” he recalled. “I have to write something.”

 

So he pulled off the covers, turned on his MacBook Pro and spent less than an hour composing a response to Burns that was published on Deadspin.com and lifted Kluwe off the sports pages and into the national conversation about the rights of same-sex couples.

 

For a man who had a perfect verbal score on the SAT, and whom friends, family, teammates and coaches describe as having “no filter,” the brickbat that Kluwe gorilla-swung at the notion of civil discourse became as much the story as the message itself.

 

“This is more a personal quibble of mine, but why do you hate freedom?” he wrote. “Why do you hate the fact that other people want a chance to live their lives and be happy, even though they may believe in something different than you, or act different than you? How does gay marriage, in any way shape or form, affect your life?”

 

The letter is a profanity-laden rant, as well as a multilayered, point-by-point decimation of Burns’s argument, so insidiously thorough that Burns waved the white flag two days later in an interview with The Baltimore Sun in which he said, in effect, “Never mind.”

 

“My writing style comes from a storied history on the World of Warcraft forum boards,” Kluwe said, referring to the enormously popular online role-playing game. “And in that context, the letter was actually really tame. I toned it down quite a few notches. I knew from the start, I wanted to make it funny, but I definitely couldn’t go full-bore on it.”

 

His definition of full-bore is debatable; what’s not in question is the positive manner in which his missive has been received across all sexual orientations and political affiliations.

 

“The guy’s got a way with words,” Rush Limbaugh said of Kluwe on his radio show.

 

Kluwe said: “It was funny because it felt like a sign of the apocalypse that Rush Limbaugh and whoever it was from the far left end of the spectrum were both congratulating me. Are pigs flying overhead now?”

 

Some in the Minnesota news media, used to local athletes and celebrities stringing clichés together, appreciate Kluwe’s candor and his ability to speak extemporaneously on any number of subjects. A voracious reader of as many as five books a week, he has emerged as the local go-to guy for a sound bite about a Michael Moore documentary or the latest action video game. (He stopped playing World of Warcraft 18 months ago, he said, because “it wasn’t a challenge anymore.”) After his response to Burns became widely known, people in the news media privately and publicly expressed admiration for Kluwe’s ability to turn a memorable phrase.

 

“He might be a better writer than he is a punter,” said Bob Sansevere, a columnist with The St. Paul Pioneer Press, who has covered the Vikings since 1984 and is a regular on the Twin Cities’ top-rated morning radio show on KQRS. He added, “I’ve never seen an athlete who can write like that.”

 

What added to Kluwe’s angst that night in his bedroom was the proposed amendment to the Minnesota Constitution known as Recognition of Marriage Solely Between One Man and One Woman, which is on the Nov. 6 ballot.

 

“There are only 4 percent of Minnesotans undecided on this question,” says Richard Carlbom, the campaign manager of the coalition Minnesotans United for All Families, an umbrella organization for more than 600 groups working to defeat the amendment. “Right now it’s a dead heat.”

 

Kluwe lent his brash voice against the amendment, appearing in radio advertisements and writing a letter on behalf of Minnesotans for Equality, a fund-raising arm of Minnesotans United for All Families. He recently began selling T-shirts printed with two of the more colorful terms from his letter to Burns. Proceeds will be split between Kluwe’s charity, Kick for a Cure, which benefits children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and Minnesotans for Equality.

 

“Last spring we contacted Chris through Twitter,” said Brad Michael, a committee chairman for Minnesotans for Equality. “He had tweeted about the Kim Kardashian-Kris Humphries divorce.” (Sent via his @ChrisWarcraft Twitter handle, Kluwe’s message was: “Dear Sanctity of Marriage — Nyah hah!”)

 

Kluwe responded to Michael immediately.

 

“I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a good thing,’ ” he recalled. “I really want to make sure that the amendment doesn’t pass because I think it’s an assault on human rights and civil rights.”

 

Kluwe followed up with appearances on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and local network news, and conducted newspaper, radio and Web interviews. He has been written about in The Guardian and The Times of London.

 

In addition, Kluwe wrote two profanity-free (and much less publicized) letters to other opponents of same-sex marriage, the first to Ravens center Matt Birk, his former teammate. In the second letter, to Archbishop John C. Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis and Pope Benedict XVI, he quoted Scripture despite his being agnostic.

 

“He’s the polar opposite of your stereotypical football player,” said Cullen Loeffler, the Vikings’ long snapper and Kluwe’s close friend.

 

Most recently, Kluwe was featured in Out magazine, posing shirtless, at his wife’s urging, for several photos that he expected to be locker-room fodder among relatively tight-knit, conservative teammates.

 

Handling such politically delicate matters is new territory for the N.F.L., which has recently been assaulted by concussion issues, player bounties and inept replacement referees. When asked to comment about the Ayanbadejo situation during a Politico forum in September, Commissioner Roger Goodell said: “Listen, I think in this day and age, people are going to speak up about what they think is important. They speak as individuals, and I think that’s an important part of our democracy.”

 

Paul Tagliabue, the previous N.F.L. commissioner, said he planned to donate $100,000 to support same-sex marriage in Maryland.

 

Despite the league’s macho culture, Kluwe said: “I had quite a few teammates come up to me and say: ‘We appreciate you speaking out in support of Brendon. We may not agree with you on that marriage issue, but at the same time everybody has got the right to speak.’ And then I’ve had a couple teammates come up and say, ‘We agree with you, we think you did the right thing, and that was a great letter you wrote.’ ”

 

Last year, during the final weeks of the N.F.L. lockout, after the stars Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, Logan Mankins and Vincent Jackson tried to alter some of the contract language, Kluwe wrote to Deadspin, describing them in a way that is unprintable here. At that moment, the world became aware of Kluwe.

 

The former Broncos tight end Nate Jackson’s response on Deadspin was titled, “Dear Chris Kluwe: When We Want the Punter’s Opinion, We’ll Ask for It (We Won’t).”

 

Kluwe fired back, ridiculing Jackson’s lack of playing time in a Deadspin column called “Can I Kick It? (Yes, I Can),” which he ended, “You’re not the only one who can craft a sentence, my friend.”

 

The roots of Kluwe’s activism can be traced to his upbringing in Los Alamitos, Calif. His parents, Ronald, an executive at a company that works with biofuels, and Sandy, an anesthesiologist, raised him and his younger brother and sister, Greg and Kim, to be freethinkers who embraced both culture and sports. Kluwe became a violin prodigy who could play by ear, and he developed an advanced vocabulary.

 

“His grandmother gave him ‘The Twits’ by Roald Dahl when he was 4 or 5,” Sandy Kluwe said, referring to the dark children’s tale. “He could read it, so obviously he had subversive literature at a very early age, and it apparently stuck with him.”

 

Family dinners often involved lively discussions in which the children were encouraged to defend their opinions. They were taught to treat people the same way, no matter their race, sexual orientation or financial status. The constant companions of Kluwe’s childhood were not toys but books that showed him a world beyond his bedroom. When he was 11, his grandmother, an aerospace engineer and adventurer who climbed Kilimanjaro in her 70s, took him on a two-week trip to Antarctica.

 

In 1994, his parents opted to home-school Kluwe, who tested above his grade. They wanted to keep him with his peers athletically rather than have him enter high school a year early. Sandy Kluwe created a rigorous curriculum, which consisted of “Shakespeare, the Federalist papers and Latin conjugations,” he said.

 

At Los Alamitos High School, Kluwe decided to play football instead of soccer. A kicker and punter, he once struck a 60-yard field goal in a playoff game to force overtime. (Los Alamitos eventually won, 30-23.)

 

“He came home one day from a kicking camp and said, ‘I’m going to get a scholarship to play football in college,’ ” Sandy Kluwe said, “ ‘and then I’m going to play in the N.F.L.’ Just like that.”

 

Much to his parents’ dismay, Kluwe turned down Harvard to attend U.C.L.A., where he graduated in 2003 with a double major in political science and history.

 

Ronald Kluwe said: “When he got off the phone with the Harvard coach, he said: ‘Dad, I’ll be the second biggest guy on the Harvard team, and I’m the punter.’ And I said, ‘O.K., Chris, just let your mother know because I’m not that brave.’ ”

 

Although no team drafted him out of college, Kluwe joined the Vikings in 2005 and had three successful seasons, averaging 43.6 yards. That led to an $8.3 million contract extension that runs through 2013. Through six games this season, he is averaging 46.4 yards per punt, just above his career average. His position coach is pleased.

 

“He’s a very intelligent guy, and he’s a fine punter,” Mike Priefer, the Vikings’ special teams coordinator, said. “Although he’s a very funny guy, he’s very motivated and focused on game day, and very coachable.”

 

Whether his deal will be extended is uncertain, as is where his family will live. For his first five years with the Vikings, the Kluwes lived in Minnesota year-round. “Minnesota’s not bad in the few weeks of spring,” he said dryly.

 

But they recently bought a second home in Huntington Beach, Calif. He and Isabel are considering bringing up the children there while visiting Minnesota during the season.

 

Although Kluwe says he has no idea what he will do in retirement (“Play video games?” his mother said), he will probably not recede from public view. He blogs for The Pioneer Press several times a week, and his growing popularity makes it possible that he will have a national platform someday. The good he has done for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people in the Twin Cities and elsewhere is tangible.

 

“In the sports bar where I hang out, they now see this issue differently because of Chris Kluwe,” said Brad Michael, of Minnesotans for Equality. “That impact can’t be measured.”

 

It is doubtful that Kluwe will join the fraternity of former coaches and players in sports broadcasting. There is a better chance of seeing him on an episode of “Nova,” bemoaning the fact that after centuries of studying the heavens, we still know so little about our existence.

 

“I saw a study a couple days ago where they showed a scaled picture of the size of the dust cloud that surrounds our galaxy,” Kluwe said, putting his bass guitar down. “And then you zoom out and see how far away our galaxy is from all the others, and it’s this microscopic dot. And that’s just one galaxy out of the billions and trillions there are in the universe. You’re going to tell me we have all the answers?”

 

He did not wait for a response before continuing, “If you look at it, our planet and our being on the planet is almost a 0.0 percent chance of happening in the size of the universe.” He thought for a moment. “You know, we could be nothing more than a quantum fluctuation in the stat line of the universe.”

 

With that, the most interesting man in the N.F.L. popped a few more Gobstoppers into his mouth and stepped into the cold night air before driving back to the team hotel, moments before curfew.

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