Because of the lack of immediate correction, there WAS injury. The singers, at the time, had no idea what had happened, or why. They didn’t know whether it was an honest mistake or whether anyone would be fired for it. They were looking forward to singing, and had that opportunity snatched away from them. They understandably felt injured.
I am a member of a Gay Men’s Chorus. Nobody discriminates against anyone. In fact, we’ve had straight guys in the chorus, and there was absolutely no problem. A number of years ago we even debated the possibility of allowing women to join. The measure was narrowly defeated. If that’s discrimination, sue us.
Nothing Peremensoe did was against the rules. Ellipses are being considerate, but not required.
Just as long as the quoter doesn’t change anything or add anything. In this case, he/she quoted exactly what you said.
To clarify, according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition, section 13.50, ellipses are not used before the first word of a quote, or after the last word. So “normal editing rules” would not require ellipses. Ellipses are mainly used to indicate omissions within a quote. Since whole sentence was quoted, and the meaning was not changed, the quote was within the rules.
I mean, in time to salvage the planned event, of course.
Don’t be silly. All of this is literally, physically under the control of the game production team. I don’t know exactly how the Padres split up the work, but all of it was within the scope of somebody’s job. Yet they chose to do… nothing. Just let the wrong clip play out, without explanation? Shoddy work, at best.
If they got a sound file or disc that was unlabeled, and if they didn’t listen to it first, yes, incredibly shoddy.
In a big venue like this you got one job, and a lot of people hear you do it. There really is no excuse not to do it right. You need to have the file labeled properly, with a name and probably a date, and you should proof listen to it first, all the way through. That way you make sure it doesn’t have any copy errors, and that someone didn’t slip you a “funny” file.
For these reasons alone, they should fire the guy. There’s probably a long line of folks who would like that job.
I don’t get the outrage. Is nothing ever allowed to go wrong? We’re talking about singing a song before an entertainment event, for cripes sake! If there was any evidence that it was due to prejudice than fine, fire him, but otherwise it’s people making a big show of playing the victim card. I just can’t imagine being so thin-skinned that I would still be upset after accepting an apology.
Plus it makes it harder to deal with real cases of prejudice.
From here, an effort to dissect the errors in the initial reporting.
The tone of that article is generally unapologetic for getting some key facts wrong in the initial reporting, but does a pretty good job of explaining the initial assumptions – for example, there was apparently an attempt ahead of time to ask the Chorus to pay for tickets to the game.
But in general, I think the intersection of gay men and professional sports created a certain wariness on the gay men side, and the audio system mistake looked very much like a deliberate slap in the face. A bit of time and a cooler look at things has produced as much of a retraction as I think is reasonable, and it’s produced a venue for the Padres to reach out to the LGBT community, so on balance, I think more good than ill comes from the initial misunderstanding.
Things can go wrong, that’s why the chorus wants him to be hired back. But you not understanding the outrage is puzzling. Have you no idea of the recent history of gay discrimination? You cannot say “this has nothing to do with gays” when in many places, they are still a reviled minority. Discrimination still happens, and always assuming it isn’t discrimination leads to many people able to turn a blind eye to the harm being inflicted upon them. I’d rather err on the side of discrimination to ensure that everyone knows that bigotry will not be tolerated. If there’s a mistake, apologies will be made and we’ll move on. But its better than letter actual discrimination fester for a long time because you don’t have iron-clad evidence.
Bigotry is in people’s hearts, its very difficult to find overt proof of it. There’s always some explanation. That excuse needs to stop
OTOH, crying “discrimination!” where there is none will, over time, be just as damaging to the cause - the boy who cried wolf syndrome. People eventually start ignoring the cry altogether.
Assuming without evidence that the mistake was due to discrimination is dumb and wrong; the guy lost his job over it (although he might get it back). You don’t see a problem with that? There was plenty of circumstantial evidence that it was a simple mistake: other gay groups had been invited without mishap, including (I believe) the singing group in question.
Playing the victim card and exhibiting outrage at every incidence that might be discrimination is not going to help end discrimination.
People should get the facts, hear both sides, and only then raise umbrage if required. Jumping to conclusions is almost never right.
This was the culmination of a series of problems in this event. The team had tried to force the members of the chorus to pay for tickets to the game, something that was not required by other national anthem performers.
The Padres’ official statement was that the termination of the contractor, and “discipline” of the in-house employee, followed the conclusion that there was “no evidence of malicious intent on the part of any individuals involved.”
In any event, canning the guy who fucked up, who caused the team this problem, is not unreasonable. Even if everyone had been sure all along that no anti-gay malice was intended.
Except we have lots of anti-discrimination laws so crying “discrimination” doesn’t seem to have the effect you’re worried about. OTOH, when conservatives like to bully a certain group and cry “we’re the victims why can’t we bully” probably does have the effect you’re talking about.
Do we know this is a fact? I know that the Padres asked the chorus members to buy tickets, but do we know that they only asked the gay chorus to buy tickets and not anyone else singing on other days?