Watch for this: There’s a growing media meme that anti-gay bullying is the direct result of religion. So unfounded. So not true. But so easy for people to accept uncritically. Like that media storyline from a few years ago that spouse abuse increased on Super Bowl Sunday. No basis for the claim whatsoever, but the canard spread rapidly. Why? Because it seemed so “obvious.” Snopes, the go-to website for myth-busting, wrote about the legend, which first appeared in mainstream media in 1993:
Writers and pundits were quick to offer reasons why this “fact” was so obviously true. After all, everyone knows that men are mostly loutish brutes, and football is the epitome of mindless, aggressive, violent, testosterone-driven macho posturing. Certainly during the culmination of the football season, the final, spectacular, massively-hyped "super" game, more men than ever are going to express their excitement or disappointment by smacking their wives or girlfriends around. So much attention did the "Super Bowl abuse" stories garner that NBC aired a public service announcement before the game to remind men that domestic violence is a crime.
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The ensuing weeks and months saw a fair amount of backpedalling by those who had propagated the Super Bowl Sunday violence myth, but - as usual - the retractions and corrections received far less attention than the sensational-but-false stories everyone wanted to believe, and the bogus Super Bowl statistic remains a widely-cited and believed piece of mis-information.
In 1993, the story was about loutish football fans. Is this year’s meme about the specter of Scripture-fueled bullies?
One response worth reading: Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, does a fine job expressing both compassion and conviction in response to claims that anti-gay bullying is religiously motivated.
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