Sonics/Storm spokesman says owners' politics shouldn't matter "out here"
10:56 AM
The PI today picked up on Josh Feit's reporting about Sonics/Storm owners support for an anti-marriage equality group run by right wing homophobe Gary Bauer. Without crediting Feit, the PI reporter repeated most of his enterprise reporting, but managed to add a response from a Sonics spokesman who insisted that the co-owners Oklahoma politics shouldn't matter "out here."
Sonics spokesman Jim Kneeland said the co-owners' contributions and political activity do not contradict the NBA's recent condemnation of bigotry.Feit points out that Bauer's group, which lobbied for a federal discrimination amendment, was trying to impose their views "out here."
"First of all, (Clay Bennett), who is the managing partner in this effort, is not involved in anyway," Kneeland said. "That's a key distinction.
"People are entitled to have their views, they are not views that I happen to agree with ... but they are not trying to impose them on anyone out here," Kneeland said.
"I won't argue that some of the owners may have more conservative political views than the norm out here; one of the things that they agreed to when they bought the team is that they would leave their politics at the state line," Kneeland said. "They have done that. They were not involved in the election cycle out here last year and have no intention of doing so."
Ward is the chief executive officer of an oil and natural gas production company. McClendon is chief executive of a natural gas production company. Both companies have headquarters in Oklahoma City. The ownership team of which they are a part also owns the WNBA's Seattle Storm.
Um, that's the whole point of Americans United to Preserve Marriage. They're trying to impose their view that gays can't get married onto gay couples that want to get married.
Labels: politics, Seattle, sports, Washington
2 Comments:
I don't see how this is hypocritical. The owners knowingly hired active and unrepentant lesbians as entertainers on a basketball team. The same owners in private believe that these lesbians are attacking the sacred institution of marriage and a dangerous predatory risk to young impressionable children. How is that inconsistent?
I called them "bigots" in one of the headlines, but I don't think I've ever called Ward and McClendon "hypocrites." I accept that they are probably consistent bigots. And they probably even believe the same kind of nonsense that micro posted.
Team spokespersons have been trying to distance the teams (for which Ward and McClendon do not exercise management control) from the politics of the co-owners. And that's because this is a bit of an embarrassment for a team that has said it markets itself to the gay community.
I'm guessing that there are some (like, say, micro above) who would be more willing because of the political views of the co-owners to support these guys as they ask for $300 mil in tax money to build a new sports palace. But, for the rest of us here in very-blue Washington, we might think twice about handing over tax dollars so that these owners can, instead, spend their millions on lobbying efforts to put a bill of discrimination into the constitution.
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