Cartoon thanks to Leunig. Below: Manly coach Des Hasler is out of his depth on woke politics.

By TONY MOBILIFONITIS

MANLY Sea Eagles coach Des Hasler, club owner Scott Penn and ARL chief Peter V’landy are all rank amateurs when it comes to dealing with woke totalitarian politics along with Sydney Roosters coach Trent Robinson who thinks gays, queers and trannies will be psychologically damaged if footy clubs don’t make token gestures of support by wearing rainbow colours.

More than 25,000 emails of support sent by Australian Christian Lobby supporters to the seven players who refused to wear the “LGBTIQ-friendly jerseys” at the Manly-Roosters game should tell this footy elite something about the reality of the LGBTIQ+ political campaign. Thursday night’s crowd also included a silent protest with ACL supporters holding up placards in support of the seven.

Those seven players were doing what they were entitled to do – exercise their lawful religious and political rights. The gay jersey idea is not only tokenism but a naïve sell out to a small minority of conniving political radicals who are playing the ARL and all other sports caught up in this nonsense, for fools.

Historically, the term for used for the dupes of the communists is “useful idiots”. These days radical gender identity ideology is being driven by a global network of New Left change agents working out of universities, UN agencies, governments and the vast global networks associated with the World Economic Forum. The ideology is part of what these people call the “global liberal order”, which is a failing political and economic system.

Like the AFL administrators who jumped in years ago, Hasler, V’landy, Penn, Robinson and company didn’t think this issue through. They and the corporate sponsors of the game who think they can coerce players to act against their lawful political and religious beliefs are seriously lacking in understanding.

AFL fell to the depths when Richmond and Collingwood “took a knee” for the neo-marxist Black Lives Matters in June 2020. The explanation given by the naïve AFL boss Gillon McLachlan was “racism needs to be stamped out”. But two years on, a global awakening against wokism has been taking place.

Josh Aloiai, Jason Saab, Christian Tuipulotu, Josh Schuster, Haumole Olakau’atu, Tolutau Koula and Toafofoa Sipley all withdrew from last Thursday night’s Manly-Roosters game on religious and cultural grounds. These players, who come from a strong Christian Pacific Island culture, apparently know that LGBTIQ ideology contradicts Christianity on some very basic levels, such as the biblical teaching that male and female are both the divine and natural order for humanity.  

The same players were accused of hypocrisy because they never objected to being sponsored by gambling and liquor companies. But there is a profound difference between playing with a commercial sponsor’s name on your jersey and being forced to support a political movement that militantly attacks your religious convictions.

The latest report on the episode is that the seven players have agreed to wear the shirts next season “if they are consulted”. This sounds odd. Could it be that they have had their contracts threatened? This is not the end of this story by any means.

The underlying problem is that sports fans in general don’t understand issues around religious and political rights because they don’t know the law. Fans and players alike are being used by the political zealots and woke sponsors to push their pet causes. But thanks to Manly’s Magnificent Seven, the fans and administrators are getting a real lesson in the politics of woke.

The advice of the awakened population towards footy coaches and administrators is to give woke culture the flick. That includes deals to make players wear jerseys featuring a rainbow trim “to celebrate inclusiveness”.

As pointed out by ACL leader Martyn Iles and others, how is “celebrating inclusiveness” consistent with forcing players off the paddock because of their political and religious beliefs? It has happened too many times, but that’s the poison pill that comes with woke culture, which is really leftist, globalist totalitarianism disguised as “compassion” or “tolerance”.

Andrew Bolt of Sky News says the Manly club management forcing players to wear this particular jersey without prior consultation was “emblematic of a broader hypocrisy and bullying attitude among the cultural elite”.

Arrogant organisations – sports codes particularly – have been forcing their members to bend their knee, literally, to woke movements to prove their alleged tolerance on race and gender, says Bolt.