Nancy Armour, USA Today‘s extremely liberal sports columnist, is not satisfied that the State of North Carolina bent to the will of militant gay activists and began a repeal of its bathroom law meant to protect vulnerable women and children from predators. For her tastes, the repeal effort doesn’t go far enough, and she has now written a piece demanding that the NCAA continue to punish the Tar Heel State despite the fact that its legislature bent to liberal pressure to address the law.
In a March 31 article filled with name calling, invective and hatred, Armour insisted that the NCAA needed to continue to ban tournaments from being played in North Carolina, even though the state did exactly what the NCAA has been demanding it do, namely repealing its HB2 bathroom law.
Despite that a mere basketball league has no right to interfere in a state’s legislative process, Armor is still in high dudgeon over the law and is urging the sports league to continue its punishment.
You may remember Armour as one of those members of the sports media who is far more concerned with pushing her far-left ideas about politics onto sports at the expense of actual sports news. She is the columnist who made herself notorious in January for insisting that Patriots quarterback Tom Brady shouldn’t be allowed to be a supporter of President Donald Trump without answering to her and those who agree with her.
As far as North Carolina goes, one of the repeal provisions that set Armour off was where it allows local municipalities to make their own rules until the year 2020.
“In other words, small-minded municipalities that want to legalize intolerance, you’re on the clock,” Armour bloviated. “You have three years to impose all the hate and ugliness you can before state leaders hopefully find their consciences and their backbones.”
Armour was also incensed that the NCAA seems to be realizing just how problematic, if not idiotic, its ban on North Carolina is.
During a recent press conference, NCAA President Mark Emmert noted that they are starting to see the problem with their thinking.
“The fact that the board only identified one state that it didn’t want to go to, while recognizing there were 49 other states with various degrees of support or restrictions around LGBT rights and other civil rights issues, it certainly meant that they saw North Carolina as distinctive,” Emmert said on Thursday.
Clearly, the NCAA is just starting to understand that their stance against North Carolina is teetering on a slippery slope. Sure, they stood up against NC’s HB2, but what will they do when the activists in their midst begin agitating about laws they don’t like in other states?
How many boycotts can the NCAA launch? Also, how can they punish North Carolina, but not any other state whose laws their favorite activists don’t like? How far will all this political activism go before there is a major backlash against the NCAA and college sports? At some point there will have to be diminishing returns on these political actions.
Emmert seems poised to begin drawing back on all this political activism, and with good reason. It is fraught with trouble for the league.
But, reality doesn’t much seem to affect Nancy Armour.
“The NCAA has a rare opportunity to create change, both in North Carolina and other states considering similar laws,” Armour screamed at her readers, appearing to imagine a sports league’s job to “promote change” instead of, you know, playing basketball.
“North Carolina has become a pariah since the passage of HB2. PayPal canceled plans for a facility that could have brought 400 jobs to the state. Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam and Ringo Starr canceled concerts,” she wrote.
While these actions are true, the facts show that North Carolina really hasn’t suffered much by way of negative impact on its economy. A review of the state’s economy for 2016 shows that the various boycotts have had little financial effect.
In the end, the Chicago-based Armour claims that state lawmakers “lost their nerve” to go as far as she wanted them to go to address the repeal of HB2 and she wants the NCAA — unelected and without legal right though it is — to continue its efforts to force the state to do her bidding.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.