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Fox News VP: The US Olympic team isn’t white & straight enough

Update: The article has been pulled from Fox’s website.

The Winter Olympics in PyeongChang are starting today, and Fox News Vice President John Moody is mad.

Unless it’s changed overnight, the motto of the Olympics, since 1894, has been “Faster, Higher, Stronger.” It appears the U.S. Olympic Committee would like to change that to “Darker, Gayer, Different.” If your goal is to win medals, that won’t work.

He cites a Washington Post article about diversity in the U.S. team. Of the 243 athletes, ten are black, ten are Asian American, and three are LGBT. (The Washington Post said there were only two – Adam Rippon and Gus Kenworthy – but they forgot about speed skater Brittany Bowe.)

So the team is 4% black and 4% Asian American, representing a country that’s 13% black and 5% Asian American.

It’s also 1% LGBT and 99% straight or not out.

That’s approaching Tea Party levels of whiteness, and the only way a crowd that size could get any straighter is if they kicked athletes off for being queer.

For the current USOC, a dream team should look more like the general population.

So Moody agrees that the team isn’t diverse enough, and that structural bias limits minorities’ participation and, consequentially, makes it easier for straight and white people to-

So, while uncomfortable, the question probably needs to be asked: were our Olympians selected because they’re the best at what they do, or because they’re the best publicity for our current obsession with having one each from Column A, B and C?

Did you catch that? The team is actually so diverse that it doesn’t look “like the general population.” Moody could have googled for 30 seconds and found U.S. Census Bureau statistics before opening his mouth, but then he works at Fox News, where being right is less important than being white.

Insisting that sports bow to political correctness by assigning teams quotas for race, religion or sexuality is like saying that professional basketball goals will be worth four points if achieved by a minority in that sport – white guys, for instance – instead of the two or three points awarded to black players, who make up 81 percent of the NBA. Any plans to fix that disparity? Didn’t think so.[…]

At the Olympic level, not everyone is a winner. Not everyone gets a little plastic trophy to take home.

Nowhere does Moody show any proof that the two dozen black, Asian, and LGBT athletes on the 2018 U.S. Olympic Team didn’t earn their places. He doesn’t quote a single judge who gave extra points to gay figure skaters, nor a single official who insisted on letting a slower bobsledder on the team because she’s black.

These athletes earned their spot like everyone else did, and he’s calling them affirmative action picks. And the only proof he needs is that they aren’t straight and white.

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