The Punter (Chris Kluwe) Makes His Point (NY Times) [View all]

[DinahMoeHum]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/sports/football/punter-chris-kluwes-voice-is-heard-in-same-sex-marriage-debate.html?ref=sports&_r=0

Punter Chris Kluwe's voice is heard in same-sex marriage debate.

Great in-depth story of Chris Kluwe's background and his emergence as an athlete and activist.

(snip)
When he is under assault, Kluwe is clearly in his element.

In late August, the Maryland state delegate Emmett C. Burns Jr. wrote to the Baltimore Ravens’ owner, Steve Bisciotti, urging him to silence linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo. Ayanbadejo had been supporting the state’s Civil Marriage Protection Act, which will allow gay couples to obtain a civil marriage license beginning Jan. 1 if it passes a Nov. 6 referendum. Burns asked Bisciotti to “inhibit such expressions from your employee and that he be ordered to cease and desist such injurious actions.”

“I know of no other N.F.L. player who has done what Mr. Ayambadejo is doing,” Burns wrote, misspelling Ayanbadejo’s surname.

Nine days later, at 11:30 p.m. in the master bedroom of the modest Savage, Minn., home that Kluwe shares with his wife, Isabel, and daughters, Olivia, 4, and Remy, 2, Kluwe came across Burns’s dispatch while surfing the Web.

“So I’m lying in bed, and I keep thinking over and over about this letter, and I’m like, ‘I can’t fall asleep,’ ” he recalled. “I have to write something.”

So he pulled off the covers, turned on his MacBook Pro and spent less than an hour composing a response to Burns that was published on Deadspin.com and lifted Kluwe off the sports pages and into the national conversation about the rights of same-sex couples.

For a man who had a perfect verbal score on the SAT, and whom friends, family, teammates and coaches describe as having “no filter,” the brickbat that Kluwe gorilla-swung at the notion of civil discourse became as much the story as the message itself.
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Much more at the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/sports/football/punter-chris-kluwes-voice-is-heard-in-same-sex-marriage-debate.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=sports