Ayanbadejo (Photo by Keith Allison)Two professional football players who garnered lots of headlines last year for their outspoken support of marriage equality are now taking their advocacy to the U.S. Supreme Court. Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo and Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe filed an amici curiae brief today in support of the case to overturn California’s Proposition 8, the 2008 referendum that outlawed same-sex marriage in that state.
Proposition 8 is before the Supreme Court this week following a ruling last year by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that overturned it. That decision is being appealed by the referendum’s backers, though the argument to uphold the Ninth Circuit’s ruling has also won the support of several dozen high-profile members of the Republican Party. Now, that side also has the backing of a pair of NFL athletes.
Ayanbadejo jumped off the sports page last year as Maryland voters were weighing a ballot referendum to uphold a law legalizing same-sex marriage. As Ayanbadejo became an outspoken supporter of the law, he was assailed by a member of the Maryland House of Delegates who opposes marriage equality. Kluwe, in an epically profane post on Deadspin, came to Ayanbadejo’s defense, telling the Del. Emmett C. Burns Jr. that same-sex marriage would not “magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster.”
The brief filed before the Supreme Court does not contain any language that visceral, but it does offer a glimpse into how major American sports deal with issues of sexual orientation:
Sports figures receive a celebrity status that influences a large majority of the American population. For far too long, professional sports have been a bastion of bigotry, intolerance, and smallminded prejudice toward sexual orientation, just as they had been to racial differences decades earlier. That is finally changing, and changing drastically. The NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA, at the league level, team level, and individual level, are finally speaking out against homophobia and intolerance of LBGTQ individuals. More and more of us realize that usingdemeaning slur words like “faggot,” “queer,” and “gay” can have serious, negative consequences.
Ayanbadejo and Kluwe go on to state that just as professional sports have progressed in their treatment of participants of different ethnic backgrounds, they are starting to do likewise for sexual orientation. “Under all the bad behavior that makes the news, male professional sports for far too long have harbored bigotry, intolerance, and prejudice—with respect to both race and sexual orientation,” the brief reads. “We are just beginning to see progress with regard to the issue of sexual orientation.”
