Retired Australian tennis player Margaret Court, is one of the greatest ever.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Court won 24 Grand Slam titles. That’s more than any other player in history. Six more than Roger Federer and six more than Martina Navratilova.
I mention Federer because he’s the greatest player in history. I mention Navratilova for another reason.
Navratilova wrote a letter Thursday in an Australian paper attacking Court. Her gripe? Court’s oft-stated and religiously motivated antipathy for LGBT identity politics. Her demand? That Court’s name be stripped from the Melbourne tennis arena, which hosts the Australian Grand Slam.
According to Navratilova, “[Court’s] vitriol is not just an opinion. She is actively trying to keep LGBT people from getting equal rights (note to Court: we are human beings, too).” Navratilova concludes, “We should not be celebrating this kind of behavior, this kind of philosophy. The platform people like Margaret Court use needs to be made smaller, not bigger.”
Aside from Navratilova’s useful clarification to Court that LGBT folks are not Klingons, there’s quite a bit to address here.
Most obviously, whether sporting recognition can be mutually exclusive with sports figures having opinions and expressing them. After all, Margaret Court stadium was so named for a simple reason: she won 24 grand slams. Her personal views were and are irrelevant to that.
The question of equality, however, is relevant. What’s now at stake is Court’s right — equal to all other Australians — to express a personal opinion, versus Navratilova’s demand that she be sidelined and punished for it. The stakes matter for reasons more than sports. Since 1991, Court has been an ordained Evangelical Christian minister in Western Australia. That makes it Court’s perceived holy responsibility to articulate her views on the topic.
I think Navratilova secretly recognizes the weakness of her case. Why do I believe that? Because later in her letter, Navratilova resorts to that favored super-weapon of the LGBT left. The stick-kid. The LGBT child who will die if Christians speak freely.
Take two quotes from Navratilova’s letter: “This is not okay. This is in fact sick and it is dangerous. Kids will suffer more because of this continuous bashing and stigmatizing of our LGBT community.”
“How much blood will be on Margaret’s hands because kids will continue to get beaten for being different? This is not okay. Too many will die by suicide because of this kind of intolerance, this kind of bashing, and yes, this kind of bullying. This is not okay.”
There’s immediate intellectual tediousness to this rhetoric: “blood,” “suffer,” “beaten,” “bullying,” “suicide,” “die.” It is the substitution of fact-based thesis for emotional vomiting. Navratilova knows she can’t show the connection point between Court’s preaching and violence against kids who believe they are LGBT. She must know, because we all know that right or wrong, most teenagers are not terribly interested in evangelical theology. Navratilova simply doesn’t care. Her mission is to silence dissent. A tennis-Stalin, she must purge all diverging viewpoints. Rationality is irrelevant.
For that reason as much as any, it’s important that Court’s court remains so named.
