So what you're saying is you want someone to do what the You Can Play Project is already doing? Which features a prominent hockey general manager in Brian Burke among its founders? They've got hockey teams, soccer teams, college teams...all sharing the same message, "If you can play the game, you're welcome on our team." And Soccer in particular has sent a pretty strong message - they just suspended a player 3 games (the rest of his team's season) for uttering a gay slur on the field during a game.

As a bisexual woman who spent all too long hiding in the closet, I'm all for seeing an active athlete come out and be that role model. I'm not holding my breath it'll happe anytime soon, but I still look forward to it, regardless.

But seriously, give credit where it's due. YCP is an awesome organization, and they deserve serious kudos for what they have accomplished already.

Chris and Brendon have been at the forefront of the issue of LGBT acceptance in professional sport locker rooms because they actually work and spend many hours each day with teammates there, many of whom are not so comfortable with LGBT issues. Chris is a punter with the MN Vikings and Brendon is a linebacker with the Baltimore Ravens.

It's easy to tell other people how to live - obviously colored by our own blinded sense of what's appropriate - which is why most grown-ups stay away from telling other people how they should live or act. We set examples by doing, not telling.

But it's especially difficult to tell co-workers and family members they should change behaviors since these relationships are not really consensual. We can't choose any employer to hire us, thus we can't choose our co-workers nor do they choose us. And we don't choose the family we're born into. People are thrown together in work and family realtionships with a high degree of happenstance. Thus, when we hear people we have no real connnection with tell us to believe this or that, or to act this way or that, it grates on our sense of self and who we are and who we want to be.

That's why the work of Chris and Brendon is so fantastic since they've brought the sensitive issues of LGBT acceptance into the NFL locker rooms without creating a huge negative backlash from an employee group that tend to have very strong egos and often a high degree of machismo.

From the NY Times article linked below:

"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. (It passed, 52-48%.) 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.

A week or two after hearing about the letter, Chris Kluwe wrote a response to Emmett Burns and posted it on-line for all of his NFL co-workers and everyone else to read,

“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.” ....

“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?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/sports/football/punter-chris-kluwes-vo...

And summary of same sex marriage outcomes in recent election:

"For the first time, same-sex marriage was legalized by voters.

"In Maryland, Maine, and Washington State, voters passed such referendums. The referendums in Maryland and Washington cleared the way for same-sex marriage to take effect after the respective state legislatures passed bills to authorize it.

"The referendum in Maine is perhaps more surprising, since voters there used a “people’s veto” just a few years ago to override legislative authorization of same-sex marriage. But now, they’ve reversed themselves and made Maine the ninth state to allow same-sex marriage. And Minnesota voters did not approve a referendum to make same-sex marriage unconstitutional. This was, interestingly, the very type of measure that thirty other states have passed, most by overwhelming majorities, in the last decade or so."
http://verdict.justia.com/2012/11/13/an-historic-first