1 week Ago
Members of our Community Editorial Board, a group of community residents who are engaged with and passionate about local issues, respond to the following question: CU Boulder announced last week that it will erect a bronze statue of the late Bill McCartney, who led the Buffaloes to their only football national title, outside Folsom Field this fall. Your take?Achievements and contributions to the community should be honored. That’s why Coach Bill McCartney was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, the CU Athletic Hall of Fame and the Colorado Football Hall of Fame.
But a statue is a special kind of honor. It’s a representation of — and therefore a tribute to — a whole person, not just to their specialized skill. It’s like the difference between an Academy Award, which is given for a specific performance, and a Kennedy Center Honor, which is given for an individual’s overall contribution to our cultural life.
For example, while there’s no need to rescind Mel Gibson’s Academy Awards, his history of antisemitic remarks would probably lead most of us to vehemently oppose selecting him for a Kennedy Center Honor.Likewise, I strongly object to bestowing a local version of such an honor on someone who referred to homosexuality as “an abomination against almighty God;” who was a board member of Colorado for Family Values, the organization that promoted a state constitutional amendment (later overturned by the U.S.
Supreme Court) legalizing discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community; and who founded a national organization devoted to promoting misogynistic values. Are we intending to honor these sentiments or, like some contemporary public figures, are we just pretending that certain shameful parts of our history simply never happened?Let me explain. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Colorado was at the center of the debate regarding same-sex relationships and gender roles.
Colorado Springs had emerged as the headquarters of several influential right-wing groups, including Focus on the Family, and Mr. McCartney founded his own all-male conservative Christian group, The Promise Keepers, in Boulder in 1990. These trends culminated in the November 1992 election, when Colorado voters passed an amendment to the state constitution making it illegal to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The campaign for this measure used hateful rhetoric and outright lies to demonize members of the LGBTQ community and promote fear and hatred toward that community. The issue here was not freedom of speech or religion; the issue was Mr. McCartney’s use of his position to denigrate a particular group, position it as a threat, and promote a measure that would have enshrined discrimination in the Colorado constitution.
After all, you’d have to paint a truly terrifying picture of a group to try to justify barring the government from protecting it from unfair treatment. It was in this context that Mr. McCartney made his comments about homosexuality and promoted his views about sex and gender.
Real people, including CU students, were hurt by his rhetoric and his actions and by the hatred they legitimized. Imagine what it was like to be a LGBTQ+ CU student during this era: The most popular, influential, highly paid and well-known figure at CU was going around the campus, the city, the state and the country describing you as an “abomination.”To make matters worse, Mr.
McCartney issued some of his most objectionable remarks while standing behind a CU lectern wearing a shirt with the CU insignia, which violated a prohibition against university personnel using their CU affiliation when making political statements. This was widely perceived as an unethical and dangerously misleading attempt to add the imprimatur of the university to the movement to limit the rights of sexual minorities and confine women to traditional roles. Erecting a statue of Mr.
McCartney on the CU campus would further the mistaken impression that the university endorses his hateful views. Is that really what we want?Elyse Morgan, [email protected] chair-throwing bully of Indiana University, Bobby Knight, who once said of female sports writers that their only worth is “to have babies and make bacon,” won three NCAA basketball titles and holds a school record of 662 wins.
There is no statue commemorating his achievement on the campus of IU. “I suspect that the university would come to regret erecting a statue for Bob Knight,” said Dr. Rob Ruck, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in sports history.
“A decision to do so would expose it to blowback because Knight’s behavior contradicted the values that the institution espouses.”To place a statue of Bill McCartney on the Buff Walk east side entrance of Folsom Field is a commemoration that transcends sports. Such an honor also demonstrates that his values reflect those of the university.
Bill McCartney did not throw chairs, but he did launch cruel insults at a vulnerable gay community through organizations such as Focus on the Family and Promise Keepers. Coach McCartney infamously referred to homosexuality as an “abomination,” a statement he made from a CU podium in 1992 and later came to regret in his non-apology, apology, “I’m sorry if people took it the wrong way.” I’m afraid that’s not enough and does not undo the damage of hurtful words.
Statues, memorials and markers are about collective memory. Excised from our memory of Bill McCartney is that he lost his football scholarship from the University of Missouri in part due to his excessive drinking. His marriage suffered as he prioritized football over family.
Coach Mac would be the first to “declare himself a sinner.” None of our heroes are free of blemish. Embedded in frail humanity is a shadow of ambiguity.
In James Loewen’s “Lies Across America,” we are reminded that historical markers and statues, through ignorance or malice, undermined national memory. In short, there is an agenda behind any commemoration.Bill McCartney will forever be lauded for his achievement in sport.
But a statue that stands eight and half feet above our gaze erases a complicated history and reduces memory to a single dimension. Promoters claim it honors a legacy on and off the field, but psychologist Glenda Russell, PhD, cautions that we should consider McCartney’s full story. McCartney led players in team prayer until the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit.
“He has a right to his own beliefs, but he stepped over a line on a number of occasions when he used his position at the university to promulgate those beliefs and insist that others join him.”In Germany, “stumbling stones” are placed outside of the homes that were stolen by Nazis. The marker is a reminder that history is complicated, and memory is often flawed.
Maybe a Coach McCartney edifice needs something to add a context that acknowledges his troubling “off the field” legacy. I trust there will be no statue of John Eastman. On Dedication Day, I’ll sit by the bronze statue of Robert Frost on the CU campus and meditate on The Road Not Taken.
Jim Vacca, [email protected].
