Marc Guehi, captain of the Crystal Palace football club, is in trouble for breaking a law of the game. And, on general principle, I’m not on his side.
Law 4 of the International Football Association Board’s Laws of the Game states: “Equipment must not have any political, religious or personal slogans, statements or images.”
I agree. There is something bone-crushingly tasteless about players using their clothes as a message unrelated to football. Most spectators don’t care about the players’ innermost convictions and an inscription of any kind isn’t going to convert anybody.
It may, however, upset or even enrage some people. After all, most of us regard some messages as offensive, and football fans aren’t known for keeping their feelings to themselves. So why encourage more controversy than that already intrinsic to a football match?
Many supporters threaten – and at times perpetrate – violence to their opposite numbers. A questionable penalty has been known to kick off a mass brawl in the terraces, with broken bottles and razor blades seeing the light of day. Do we really need additional provocations, especially those that have nothing to do with the game?
We don’t. So let’s keep extraneous stuff out of football, the Association is right about that. Hence, though I sympathise with the message Guehi scribbled on his armband, “I love Jesus”, I think he was out of order to choose that particular medium.
He should have kept his beliefs off his rainbow armband… Hold on a moment. A rainbow armband? Surely that qualifies as a political (or even religious) message by itself, even in the absence of any superimposed statements. Doesn’t it? And yet the Premier League demanded that captains must turn armbands into propaganda vehicles for homosexuality as at least an equally valid form of amorous relations.
That’s not all. Last season all players were supposed to genuflect before kick-off to honour a drug-addled American criminal who was accidentally killed when resisting arrest during a robbery bust. Bending a knee is a gesture of obeisance with strong ritual overtones. Call it political or call it cultish, but that rather obscene rite did seem to violate the Association’s own laws.
That would suggest to me, and Mr Guehi, that all bets are off. If celebrating the life of a black criminal is allowed, nay mandated, then a fair argument may be made that, say, white supremacists should be granted equal time. No? Fine. In that case, let’s get rid of both forms of propaganda – or neither.
Now Marc Guehi is facing censure even though he didn’t refuse to wear an armband that clearly goes against his religion. He merely scribbled a very mild implicit rebuttal, correctly believing he was the gander entitled to the same sauce as the goose.
Sam Morsy, Ipswich Town captain, went quite a bit further when upholding his creedal principles. He refused to wear a rainbow armband altogether because it offended his “religious beliefs”. So logically speaking, one would expect him to incur a stiffer punishment than Marc Guehi, who merely added a little ornament by way of dissent.
Yet Morsy won’t be punished at all. You see, the religious beliefs that don’t allow him to exhibit LGBTQ+ livery aren’t Christian. They are Muslim, which makes them protected by another woke piety in conflict with the rainbow-coloured one.
Thus Christianity is denied equal time not only with LGBTQ+ activism but also with Islam and, I’m sure, any other Third World creed. Buddhism, definitely. Animism, probably. Zoroastrianism, why not.
Judaism? Now that’s going too far. You see, it’s not Third World enough, if at all. And, considering Israel’s ill-advised efforts to defend itself against Muslim terrorism, it’s definitely not woke.
Ipswich Town issued a statement, saying: “We proudly support… blah-blah-blah… and stand with the LGBTQ+ community in promoting… blah-blah-blah. At the same time, we respect the decision of our captain Sam Morsy, who has chosen not to wear the rainbow captain’s armband, due to his religious beliefs.” [My emphasis]
Allow me to sum up. Muslim religious beliefs are worthy of respect, and Christian ones aren’t. Islam can somehow be etched into the plaque celebrating propaganda of various perversions, psychiatric disorders, BLM fanaticism, radical feminism and other woke strikes against our civilisation. Christianity, on the other hand, doesn’t belong on that plaque at all – even though it doesn’t advocate throwing homosexuals off tall buildings or committing violence against infidels.
It’s good to know where we stand, and my congratulations to the football authorities for making the lie of the land so abundantly clear. The land is of course strewn with minefields, but let’s not talk about this now.
P.S. For all its rainbow symbolism, the FA has so far failed to persuade homosexual footballers to come out. Only one top player has ever done it and even he committed suicide soon thereafter.