Friday night at Providence Park in Portland, the Thorns hosted the North Carolina Courage for Fan Appreciation night.
Roughly twenty to twenty-five people came wearing XX-XY Athletics shirts. They kept them covered through the first half. As the second half began, they revealed the shirts and unfurled a banner reading Save Women's Sports.
What happened next is on video, which is why the Department of Justice is now reviewing it.
The sequence.
According to Fox News Digital and OutKick's reporting, members of the group were struck with flagpoles carrying transgender flags. They were surrounded and cursed at. Drinks were thrown.
A male fan shoved a 57-year-old woman wearing XX-XY apparel. She fell backward over two rows of stadium chairs.
Then stadium security arrived and physically removed the people in the XX-XY shirts.
Not the man who pushed a woman over two rows of seats. Not the people swinging flagpoles.
The ones wearing the shirts.
The reporter was assaulted too.
Matt Calkins was there on credentials, documenting it.
He had his phone knocked out of his hand. He had beer poured on his neck. He was called a Nazi.
Readers of this site will recognize the name. Calkins spent eleven years as a sports columnist at the Seattle Times and resigned this fall after the paper refused to run his column about two sixteen-year-old girls confronted at a Seattle Storm game for holding a sign supporting women's sports.
He went to OutKick. Last week he broke the story about a Washington cross-country runner who went from 76th in boys' junior varsity to second in a girls' district championship.
Friday he got assaulted covering a soccer match.
The man cannot report on this subject without something being thrown at him, and at this point that is itself the story.
Now the honest part, because we do this every time.
The protest was staged, and it was staged deliberately to be difficult to remove.
Amy Sousa, one of the organizers, reportedly timed the reveal for continuous play specifically because stopping a match to eject people is harder than doing it at a break. That was the plan.
Critics on the other side have also noted that the confrontation was not one-sided in volume, and that at least one demonstrator was shouting back aggressively in footage that received less attention.
Fine. Grant all of it.
A protest designed to provoke a reaction is still a protest, and provocation is not assault. Americans stage confrontational demonstrations at public events constantly, at games, at parades, at political rallies. The legal and moral line has never been whether the demonstration annoyed somebody. It has been whether anybody put hands on anybody.
Somebody put hands on a 57-year-old woman and sent her over two rows of chairs.
The asymmetry is what DOJ is looking at.
A Justice Department official told OutKick that based on what is known so far, the conduct described appears to raise viewpoint discrimination and First Amendment concerns.
That is the question. Providence Park allowed flags, banners and profane signs expressing one position all night. A group expressing the opposite position was removed after being physically attacked.
If a private venue wants a content-neutral policy prohibiting all political displays, it can have one. Apply it to everybody, post it at the gate, and enforce it evenly.
What it cannot do is permit one set of banners and eject the other, and that is before you get to the part where the ejected group was the one that got hit.
The police come out of this better than the stadium.
Brandi Kruse, who was among the group, specifically credited Portland police with helping them afterward, and drew a distinction between the officers and the stadium staff who did the removing.
Portland Police confirmed two potential crimes were reported. Officers were wearing and had activated body cameras, consistent with department policy. Sousa says members of her group filed reports.
So there is footage from the stands and footage from the officers, and it will either support the account or it will not.
The pattern in this series is getting hard to miss.
A Seattle Storm co-owner berated two sixteen-year-old girls over a sign and was suspended five games.
Atlanta Dream security made a mother and her seventeen-year-old daughter cover their XX-XY shirts, during a game the team branded Wellness and Health Night. The WNBA later conceded that was handled wrong.
A Seattle newspaper spiked its own columnist's story about the first incident, and he quit.
And now twenty-odd people in Portland got surrounded, struck, and escorted out while the people doing the striking stayed in their seats.
Four incidents. Same shirts. Same outcome every time.
The shirt says XX-XY. That is a description of chromosomes.
Nobody has yet explained which part of it justifies a flagpole.
- Article Source:
news.basedapparel.com
- Photo:
