The Confused World of Megan Rapinoe

© Jack Cashill
July 10, 2019 - WND.com

Full disclosure: I think soccer is a bore. I watch as little of it as I can. Authorities could improve the game considerably just by making the goals a little bigger, but that is a story for another day.

I watched none of the recent women's World Cup. The little I watched four years ago struck me as a running editorial for the abuse of the 1972 Title IX law, but that too is a story for another day.

Had I watched in 2015 I would have at least rooted for the United States. International competitions bring out the jingo in me. In 2019, I avoided TVs for fear I would have rooted for England or the Netherlands or whomever the U.S. team was beating.

I could have no more cheered for star Megan Rapinoe and her handful of fellow travelers than I could have the Soviet ladies back in the bad old days. The Russkies at least did not go out of their way to insult our president.

Enough has been written about the U.S. Team’s bad behavior in Paris. What I would prefer to do is to try to make some sense of Rapinoe's discontent. To cut to the chase, it has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump.

It was in 2015, the seventh year of the Obama presidency, that Rapinoe found a national stage for her protest when she stood in silence during the national anthem.

In September 2016, with Obama still in the White House, Rapinoe took a knee during the anthem at an international match. Obama had eight years to fix whatever inequities ailed America. Apparently, he did not do so to Rapinoe’s satisfaction.

If Rapinoe, a 34-year-old lesbian multimillionaire, is a victim of anything, it is the intersectionality mania plaguing leftists worldwide, that and the media disinformation campaign that has made all progressives crazy.

Trying to explain her delusion to a British reporter, Rapinoe said, “The more I’ve been able to learn about gay rights and equal pay and gender equity and racial inequality, the more that it all intersects,” Rapinoe says. “You can’t really pick it apart. It’s all intertwined."

Yes, it is all intertwined in ways Rapinoe does not understand.
That anyone has heard of her is due to one fact. She is a biological female. As makes perfect sense, except to progressives, women have historically competed against women and men against men.

Real “gender equity” would mean the end of women’s sports. The best female athletes cannot begin to compete against male athletes in any sport.

If proof were needed, in 2017 the U.S. women’s team prepared for a match against the Russia women’s team by scrimmaging against the under-15 boys squad from the MLS club FC Dallas. 

The U.S. women beat the Russian women 4-0. They lost to the 13 and 14-year old boys from Dallas 5-2.

The American women played the younger boys in part because they got smoked 8-2 by the Under-17 boys in 2012, the same year the American women won the Olympic gold.

Despite this inequity, female soccer stars in America are paid almost comparably to men. Where the pay gap is greatest, and the outrage the most vocal, is in World Cup payouts. A stranger to logic, Rapinoe was among the most outspoken in demanding equal pay across the board.

Four years ago, however, the Women's World Cup generated about  $73 million to the men’s $4 billion. Although the women received 13 percent of the pot and the men only 9 percent, the women’s pot was dramatically smaller.

The women’s sport is growing in popularity, but this time around the
men's World Cup in Russia will have generated about 15 times more than the women’s in Paris.  “Equal pay” in this universe makes no sense at all.

More perversely, progressive women like Rapinoe are putting the whole female sports set-aside at risk. Among other affiliations, she is an advocate for the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Educational Network (GLSEN).

One of GLSEN’s current causes is the advancement of transgender athletes. “For schools and districts, failure to be inclusive of transgender students in sports not only denies trans students the benefits of participating on a sports team, it may result in costly and divisive litigation,” GLSEN assures us.

Ignoring all evidence, the nabobs at GLSEN deny that allowing males who identify as females to play on a female team “will create a competitive imbalance.”

They further dissemble, “Trans children display the same variation in size, strength, and athletic ability as other youth.” This is nuts. Boys identifying as girls display the same variations as other boys, not as other “youth.”

Among the many things Rapinoe and her pals fail to understand is that some day soon the various subcults in the multicultural rainbow will come to blows.

A transitioning male or two, whether doing it sincerely or strategically, has the potential to take a mediocre women’s team and make them world champs.

Now, that would be something worth taking a knee to.