Latrell Sprewell
Justice
I've heard a lot of people complain that Sprewell got an unfair shake. That being fired and suspended for one year wasn't fair treatment for him assaulting his coach.
Uh huh.
How fair do they think it would have been if the coach had simply called the cops? Had Sprewell hauled off and charged with assault and battery? The man BROKE THE LAW people! Would it have been more fair to put him in jail for about a year? And when people complain about him "losing his livelihood", I want to scream HE'S A MILLIONAIRE!! What livelihood would YOU need if someone handed you a couple of million?! For PLAYING BASKETBALL!! This would be like defending Mike Tyson for biting Evander Holyfield's ear -- and it's their JOB to hit each other!
People, I've had some bosses I'd have loved to haul off and knock the spit out of, but I never did. Wanna know why? It's a little thing called maturity. And another called bills, as in, bills I need a paycheck to pay off. Why would ANYONE expect to choke their boss and get away with it? I suppose they'd only do it if they were prone to violence and thought they were irreplaceable and untouchable.
Racism
This is a total joke. Mayors Elihu Harris of Oakland and Willie Brown of San Francisco took it upon themselves to rush to the aid of the poor downtrodden Sprewell and denounce the actions of the Golden State Warriors and the NBA as unfair. Keep in mind of course that Willie Brown is the same man who publicly denounced the SF 49er's Grbac (a white man) as "an embarrassment to the human race" for playing a single football game badly. I'll blame Harris of poor judgement, (failed) political grandstanding, and following Brown's lead. Brown, on the other hand, is showing himself to have definite racist leanings. I doubt he'd ever come out and actually say, "Down with the White Man", but his brand of politics practically screams it from the rooftops.
Now others have taken up the standard. Basketball is an industry with the majority of players being black and the majority of coaches and staff being white. Is there a disparity there? Absolutely. Does this have ANYTHING to do with the Sprewell incident? Of course not. Coaches get fired all the time. Players get fired all the time. In this case, the player broke the law and assaulted his coach. What if he'd assaulted a verbally abusive black player and choked the player, then got fired? Would Brown, Harris, and the super-sensitized black racist front have jumped up foaming at the mouth quite so quickly? I sincerely doubt it.
Play the race card too much and it loses it's value. There will be situations where it NEEDS to be played. Those situations happen every day. But just because the situation already has a huge spotlight on it does not make it an appropriate situation to play the race card. Brown and Harris are posturing for the public, and doing themselves more harm than good in the process, but more importantly they are hurting those who would defend people against real racism by crying "wolf" far too often and for all the wrong reasons.
Same Sex Sexual Harassment
Jody Oncale worked on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Two of his supervisors began sexually harrassing him on the job. This harassment came in the form of fondling and sexual threats. As Mr. Oncale put it, they grabbed his genitals and threatened to sodomize him. Mr. Oncale eventually quit and sued the company on the grounds of sexual discrimination. A Federal Court of Appeals ruled that sexual discrimination laws do not apply to sexual harassment involving members of the same sex.
I've got a couple of questions here:
When I was in high school, I worked at a Wendy's in Kennewick Washington. There was a manager there by the name of Tim that made regular sexual advances at nearly every boy working under him, including myself. He would frequently grab the boys' butts, make lewd comments and suggestions, and even arrange it so that, when the store was closing, all the girls were dismissed early leaving him alone with whatever boys were on duty so he could continue his advances. At some point, the employees began trading notes on their experiences, and we reported Tim to the Wendy's corporate office. The upper management took quick and decisive action. Tim was fired.
I can state, from experience, that men can most certainly sexually harass other men, and that there should be no more tolerance for that form of harassment than from opposite sex harassment. Any form of sexual harassment in the workplace is, as Mr. Oncale's attorneys put it, "an abuse of power". I don't want to get into exactly where to draw the line between normal interaction and sexual abuse in the workplace; sexually assaulting someone in your employ by grabbing their genitals and threatening to force sex on that person is worthy of a jail sentence for the offender and heavy fines for the company that refuses to rectify the problem.