Selective free speech

San Diego State protects visiting transgender player, not Mormons

Last Saturday, a buddy and I attended a fall exhibition baseball game on the campus of San Diego State University vs. BYU. I’d forgotten how interminably long a college baseball game can go. There’s never enough pitching in college, the pitchers lack the control their Major League counterparts have, and it was the first live game anyone had played in five months.

We left after four and a half hours, with the Aztecs losing 8-6.

It was still only the sixth inning.

While we were watching both sets of pitchers struggle to find the strike zone, just over the right field fence in Peterson Gym the Aztecs women’s volleyball team was playing San José State.

The game was newsworthy mostly because it was being played. Other schools have forfeited their games against SJSU because the Spartans’ team includes a transgender player, and players on other teams have expressed misgivings at having to play against a biological male with the inherent imbalance of strength.

And, in fact, both a now-suspended assistant coach and several of the San José State players have filed lawsuits against the school and the Mountain West Conference alleging that including a biological male on a women’s team is a violation of women’s rights under the law.

That will be sorted out in time, and while it works its way through the courts the idiots on both sides of this issue need to stop making anonymous online threats against both the transgender player and the other players who have sued.

As we were leaving the parking structure before the game, we ran into private security guards who had been hired to protect everyone at the volleyball game given all the death threats everyone is receiving. They seemed as mystified as we did that people feel the need to make threats because they’re upset. On the other hand, from the perspective of the security guards it was a paycheck!

What really got my attention reading about the game the next day was the heavy-handed, utterly hypocritical and very likely illegal way that the San Diego State administration dealt with protestors at the women’s volleyball game.

I’m a 1986 grad of San Diego State. During my senior year, I called play by play for both women’s volleyball and baseball on the campus radio station, KCR.

So we’re able to take a long view of these things in this space.

Outkick.com reported that late in the game, a small group of SDSU fans held up a sign reading “Save Women’s Sports.” The also began chanting “No men in women’s sports.”

At this point, a senior member of the Athletic Department approached the group and told them they were violating rules on sportsmanship with their chant and sign and needed to stop or leave.

Asked for comment after the fact by Outkick, SDSU issued a written response: “Our athletic events are opportunities to support our teams, celebrate our community, and set a positive example for our student-athletes and guests. Poor behavior, including disrespectful language, taunting and any unsportsmanlike conduct, does not reflect the values we uphold, including the Mountain West Conference’s sportsmanship guidelines, and undermines the positive spirit of the game.”

I'm going to be blunt about my alma mater's spin here: It’s complete bullshit, pure and simple.

For decades, BYU players, coaches and fans have been subject to actual abuse, including loud chants of “Fuck you, Mormons” with zero disciplinary action against those doing the chanting. When BYU was still part of the Mountain West Conference, the student section at SDSU men’s basketball games, known as “The Show,” would regularly dress up as parodies of Mormon missionaries.

The only time SDSU ever took any action was when members of The Show were tearing pages out of the Book of Mormon, balling them up and throwing them on the court. At that point, then-coach Steve Fisher had had enough and spoke up. (However, when I, in my role as opinion section editor of a local newspaper, asked the SDSU Athletic Department for their reaction to the abuse shown the BYU team, I was told the university found The Show’s antics “imaginative.”)

In the pre-Tony Gwynn Stadium era of SDSU baseball, at old Smith Field, there was a catwalk above right field, running alongside the outer wall of the racquetball court building.

There was no seating there, and you didn’t need a ticket, but ‘The Raggers” — precursors to The Show — would stand along the Ragger’s Rail and heap the most disgusting abuse on the visiting team's right fielder.

In the spring of 1986, during a game against BYU, the Raggers were describing in great detail to the right fielder — a freshman — every twisted sexual act they could think of to perform on his mom. The kid was visibly crying, and when I — sitting in the press box calling the game for the student radio station — suggested to the PA announcer that maybe the Raggers should knock it off, I was told I had no sense of humor.

After the game, the kid was standing with his parents, who had travelled with the team, trying to hold it together.

I walked up, introduced myself, and said I was mortified at what had happened and that that was not representative of all SDSU students. They assumed I was LDS (Mormon), and I said no, just a human being with a soul.

In the ensuring decades, SDSU has allowed conservative speakers to be heckled off stage, has a policy forcing Catholic and Protestant student clubs to accept atheists as members (even those just there to create chaos), and The Show continues to heap abuse on visiting schools if they are Mormon, Catholic or otherwise Christian.

The notion that SDSU is opposed to “disrespectful language, taunting and any unsportsmanlike” conduct is provably a contemptible lie.

The SDSU administration not only allows abuse, it tacitly encourages it from The Show when targets are Mormons, Catholics and other Christians.

From what I've seen reported, the San José State player in question was neither heckled nor abused. The issue that that player’s presence represents was the subject of protest, but I’ve seen no videos that suggests it was personal or mean.

That San Diego State administrators felt empowered to censor the protest, and to do so under cover of protecting “sportsmanship,” is wrong on so many levels that you wonder how supposedly smart people can be so very self-unaware.

What is certain is that with an additional slew of lawsuits filed this week against the Mountain West Conference alleging First Amendment violations, conference member SDSU has severely undercut any rational defense with its selective enforcement of free speech at athletic events.

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