The idea that this horrible human being is still being paraded around as an exemplar of how to live and someone I need to see on TV while watching a football game is everything that is wrong with America.
Here is someone who used his considerable clout in Indiana to go on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and endorse a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.
Someone so unconcerned with his own family that his teenage son committed suicide–which many believe was due to Dungy rejecting his son for being gay.
I don’t want to see this bigoted pustule’s face on my TV screen during a relaxing Saturday evening of sports viewing. I certainly don’t want him doing radio commercials about the importance of “family values.” What was the family value when you cast your son out of your family and drove him to suicide? I guess it’s just more evidence that the stupid “family values” phrase is a thin code for “persecute homosexuals at every opportunity.” Yet, you can’t turn on a sports radio station without hearing this fucking Torquemada preach to you about “uncommon” ethics.
Tony Dungy deserves to be shunned from the popular culture universe for at least as long as Michael Richards or Isaiah Washington or others who said horrible things about races or sexualities. At least neither of them actually caused someone to die with their dumb beliefs.
Ex NFL head coach. Won a Superbowl with the Colts. He has a reputation of being a sterling “character” guy. He’s highly religious, and does a lot of volunteer work, etc, but is also anti-gay activist, something which tends to get glossed over by his hagiographers.
He had a son who committed suicide. I have no idea if the rumors are true that he did it because Dungy disowned him for being gay, but those are the rumors.
So, out of the entire OP, hell out the entire issue of gay marriage or treatment of gays in religions’ name, you find yourself needing to nitpick on the use of the word “charlatan”?
Also, if you want to argue about gay marriage, go do it in MPSIMS or GD or whatever. This is a lame rant about a D-list celeb’s stance on an issue. There are plenty of people far more worthy of blame and scorn; the OP’s outrage over having to see Tony Dungee while watching football puts the rant squarely into eyeroll territory.
He is a charlatan because he is a spokesman for “family values,” particularly in these radio spots that air every day, but he was so incompetent at participating in his own family that his son committed suicide.
Yeah, I would say something in the neighborhood of 100% of suicides by teenagers are due to either family rejection for sexual or religious identity issues, or parents too stupid/religious to recognize and get treatment for the symptoms of depression. Dungy has no business giving people parenting advice when he was (at best) so uninvolved in his own family that he allowed such a thing to happen, or (as is widely believed) actively involved in pushing his son to kill himself.
Wait, what? He was telling his son to kill himself? Or at least hinting at it? “Sure is nice out. Good slashing your teenage wrists weather, yessiree.”
This has to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read here, or at least the least thought out. The only teenagers who ever commit suicide are those whose families have rejected them for sexual or religious issues? And you have to be totally stupid or uninvolved with your family to not be able to recognize the symptoms of depression, which manifest in several different ways, many of which are amazing similar to typical teenage behavior? Try putting some thought into what you say, and then maybe people will listen to you.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, indicated that teen suicides increased following news stories about other teen suicides (“Clustering of teenage suicides after television news stories about suicide”, Phillips & Carstersen). From the abstract:
In the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Shaffer’s 1988 study “The epidemiology of teen suicide: an examination of risk factors,” does not seem to support your conclusion either.
