On Thursday, the NBA — a league that has two separate wings, one for women and one for men – declared that it would not hold its All-Star Game that insists that men go peepee in the men’s room and women go pee-pee in the ladies’ room.
There are two reasons that the NBA has decided to cram down a leftist, science-free viewpoint on gender on the rest of America. First, the bosses of the league are leftists like Adam Silver. Second, the league itself increasingly caters to a crowd that happens to lean left. Blacks spend 844 minutes per season watching the NBA; Asians spend 729 minutes; Hispanics spend 390 minutes; whites spend 290 minutes, according to Nielsen. The league’s audience is also disproportionately young: 43 percent of the audience is under 35. Blacks voted 93 percent for Obama in 2012; Asians voted 73 percent for Obama; Hispanics voted 71 percent; whites voted 39 percent for Obama. People aged 18-29 voted or Obama by a 60 percent to 37 percent margin.
So the NBA knows to whom it caters: leftists.
What’s silly about this, of course, is that the NBA doesn’t need to get political at all. But thanks to the sports media culture dominated by ESPN, which is a leftist media outlet, pressure has been placed on athletes and leagues to kowtow to politically correct leftism. That’s why the ESPY awards have recently become Ground Zero for transgender propaganda and Black Lives Matter and gun control.
All this does have consequences.
We’re in the midst of a culture war, even if Donald Trump’s preferred convention speaker, Peter Thiel, would prefer to pretend that we’re not. It does matter when a society decides that male and female are arbitrary categories, and when governments begin to cram down that utterly false message on families and children. The NBA is a private organization, to be sure, but it was never meant to be a political one – unlike issues of race historically did, issues of male/female identity have literally nothing to do with participation in the NBA itself. The NBA’s decision to politicize itself for purposes of virtue-signaling demonstrates a cultural shift that should be frightening to anyone: intolerance celebrated when it comes from the left.
Which is hypocritical, of course. Why should a private business be forced to let men into women’s bathrooms, but another private business (the NBA) has the right to deprive certain clientele of its business based on politics? Freedom either exists, or it doesn’t.
Speaking of which — why should the NBA be in any position to lecture anyone on gender discrimination when the average WNBA woman makes $0.01 for every $1 an NBA man earns? (The average salary in the WNBA is $72,000 per year, while the average salary for men is $4.6 million.)
But all this is okay so long as you’re on the political left. Freedom exists for the NBA, but not for private businesses in Charlotte. Owners in red states can expect second-class treatment from the NBA from now on. In the name of social justice, of course.