< PREVIOUS ]   [ 1992 Index ]   [ Ed Quillen HOME ]   [ SEARCH ]   [ NEXT >


What family values?

Published 16-Feb-1992 in the Denver Post
Copyright ©1992 by Ed Quillen. All rights reserved.

It's amazing how long some adults keep those youthful habits produced by indoctrination and intimidation in physical education classes. They can democratically refer to President Bush as mere Bush, and to Governor Romer as a breezy Romer, but on TV lately, it's still a deferential Coach McCartney.

Bill McCartney signed his name and job title, head football coach at the University of Colorado, to some propaganda issued by Colorado for Family Values. That's an outfit, based in Colorado Springs of course, which wants to amend our state constitution so that home-rule cities like Denver and Boulder will be forbidden to enact gay-rights ordinances.

CU President Judith Albino quickly ordered an attorney to determine whether McCartney had misused his connection with the university. Apparently there are acceptable and unacceptable ways for coaches to use their positions for profit and influence. It is generally acceptable for a coach to accept money from sporting-goods manufacturers, or to get a lucrative contract from a television station for a weekly program. Someday we may learn what is unacceptable behavior for a winning coach, but that day has yet to dawn.

Now if McCartney is truly a man who follows the Bible, he has no choice but to call male homosexuality an abomination of Almighty God, for as it is written, Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. (Leviticus 18:22).

As far as our national constitution is concerned -- we just celebrated the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights, which are also the Rights of Bill here -- McCartney has every right to expound his religious beliefs and to petition the government for redress of his grievances.

That shouldn't even be an issue. Here's the real question: Why would Colorado for Family Values want McCartney's name anywhere near their operation?

Unwed motherhood is not something that most of us deem a good family value, and yet that's the status of McCartney's daughter.

Date rape isn't exactly my idea of a family value either, but when two of his players were accused of date rape, McCartney rushed to their defense, saying the act had to be violent to be rape. Presumably that definition also exonerates another family-value CU football player, the hulking rapist who bound his gagged victims in duct-tape. Not much violence there, either, since the women couldn't struggle -- another family value and another result of how sports build character?

It's hard to think of any traditional family value encouraged by big-time sports. If Wilt Chamberlain's 20,000 liaisons were a family value, then George Bush is a man of steadfast conviction and David Duke will be the next president of the NAACP. How many children are disappointed and perhaps confused on Father's Day when Steve Garvey or Vance Johnson is nowhere to be found? I hold deep doubts that Martha would consider it a family value if I, like Jose Canseco, set up a 900 line so that I could collect money from callers while I described her body.

As nearly as I can tell, Colorado for Family Values is really a clever plot by abortionist single-parent homosexuals to make their opponents look like fools. Why else would Colorado for Family Values have wanted Bill McCartney?


< PREVIOUS ]   [ 1992 Index ]   [ Ed Quillen HOME ]   [ SEARCH ]   [ NEXT >