Not to be a pedant, but this was also the Catholic church (primarily).

But qualifying his support with a drive-by mention of “Regardless of our past, good and bad, and no matter how long ago it was” cheapens the sentiment and unnecessarily centers him in Spears’s ongoing and devastating ordeal.

I should also mention that there are several retired NFL players who have come out.

A 14-year-old Billie Eilish mouthing racist lyrics is a... I mean, what is even the response to this problem? Have we even decided who gets to sing along to “Jesus Walks” yet?

Not whitewashed - he never made an NFL roster, and didn’t stick in the CFL (Canadian Football League) either. I seem to remember him running into some significant mental health problems - the pressure of being a pioneer in a space like that is something that would be almost impossible to bear, I imagine.

And huge chunks of America are prudish. America has always been prudish about sex and blasé about violence. The MPAA ratings board has made this explicitly clear. So yes, I fully expect that there are a significant number of people that would hesitate to buy their 6 year old a Batman t-shirt if they know that Batman…

Also:

I’m starting to get pissed off about this. According to the Harley Quinn show makers, DC’s objection was not that Batman doesn’t give head.

Talking behind someone’s back is not confrontation. You can be strongly averse to confrontation and write snark online with no trouble.

And my point was that finding a single person in your office, let alone a highly paid PR outfit, that actually understood the issue, which is the racism of the antebellum south, you could have come up with a sincere answer that is even more effective than whatever insincere, unfalsifiable statement the aforementioned…

...it needed at least one or two passes by someone a little younger and a little more hooked into the vocabulary and tone of modern social justice politics.

*Off-topic word nerdery*

It will never happen because these fights are a grift, from top to bottom. To call them “fixed” misses the point.

The whole C-List Celebrity Boxing scene is grift, from top to bottom. Mayweather is an abuser with plenty of problems of his own, and he plays The Bad Guy so (white) people want to watch him lose. (Admittedly, this deserves an explanation, but I’m lazy.)

As another writer first put it, when we stopped sending so many 18 year old boys to war or manual labour, teenagers had to find new ways to “become men.” As an adolescent boy, how do you prove to yourself and others that you are becoming A Man™? Well, you go to proving grounds. And in our society, sports are some of…

Two things can be true at once: A person can be a victim of trauma, deserving of compassion and a vapid, materialistic asshole. A person can be the subject of a misogynistic media machine and a shitty, superficial racist.

Like I said, current injustices.

I can’t see a single good argument for not including women in the draft.

The issue is that women deserve to be treated as equals, and we also have to acknowledge the world as it is now.

Nothing makes me sigh louder than the declaration that Popular Comedian X “isn’t funny,” “was never funny,” etc.