Woke NBA silent on China court's homosexuality ruling

FPI / March 7, 2021

In 2017, the NBA canceled its All-Star Game that was scheduled for Charlotte, North Carolina because of a state law that restricted use of state-run bathrooms to people’s birth gender.

At the time, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said that North Carolina’s law was a “bright-line test” for a boycott of the state. He added that gay and transgender rights were “core values” of the NBA.

A Chinese court this week ruled that homosexuality can be referred to as a “psychological disorder.”

The NBA and oh-so-woke players such as LeBron James and Stephen Curry, who usually have no problem expressing political opinions, have been silent.

Yes, the NBA has its “core values,” but so too does China.

In China, it’s called “Core Interests” and it focuses on national sovereignty, i.e. the Chinese Communist Party is everything.

The NBA has a multi-billion dollar relationship with China.

It has coveted that relationship while ignoring China’s heinous human rights abuses, including the detaining of more than 1 million Muslims in concentration camps.

So, when it comes to the NBA and China, it appears that the CCP’s “Core Interests” supersede the NBA’s “core values.”

The NBA is “selling a false bill of goods to all of us in the United States," said OutKick founder Clay Travis. "They are taking and cashing checks from modern-day Nazis while claiming to be on the right side of history in America."

A court in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu this week upheld a ruling that a textbook definition of homosexuality as a mental disorder was an academic view, not an error, according to a report by the South China Morning Post.

In a January interview with GQ, Silver defended the NBA’s willingness to look the other way on China’s abhorrent human rights record:

“And through the relationships that we have in China — directly with the hundreds of millions of people in China that follow NBA basketball — we are an exporter of American values….

“…But I guess that people could say, ‘Well, it’s inconsistent with our values.’ And I’d say, ‘Do you make decisions based on one issue?’ I still believe that by engaging with people in China, by exporting what is a piece of Americana through the NBA, that we are supporting our fundamental values and that the alternative of not doing it would not improve things.”

One issue?

As if genocide weren’t enough?

With this week’s court decision in China which determined that homosexuality can be considered a mental disorder, Silver and the woke NBA have another “issue” to ignore.

Free Press International