Not much method to Methodist madness over team name

Washington Times:

The United Methodist Church has rejected Richmond for its 2012 international conference because the city's minor league baseball team is named the Braves.
"Many Native Americans, if you ask them what they think about team mascots, will tell you that they find [them] to be demeaning," said Stephen Drachler, a spokesman for the United Methodist Church.
Apparently, nobody asked Virginia's Monacan Nation, located near Lynchburg about 130 miles west of Richmond.
Kenneth Branham, Monacan chief, yesterday said, "The mascot thing has been blown out of proportion."
The problem is not that teams have American Indian names and mascots, but how those mascots act, Mr. Branham said.
"It is not so much the name as the silly way they act," he said. "When children see that, they think that is how Indians act."
The Richmond Braves don't have a mascot. They have a duck -- "a big, happy, yellow" one named "Diamond Duck," Braves spokesman John Emmett said.
What's more, the mascot for the Atlanta Braves -- the Major League parent team of the Richmond Braves -- is a large, talking baseball named "Homer."
A United Methodist Church panel last week announced that holding the General Conference in Richmond would violate a 2004 resolution barring Methodist events in cities where professional sports teams use American Indian names or symbols.

...
How can you take a church policy like that seriously?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more