LGBTQ news and entertainment
As we’ve come to expect, Dallas sportscaster Dale Hansen often brings clarity and common sense to the forefront regarding painful challenges in the U.S.
Today’s commentary addresses the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 dead.
“And here I thought guns don’t kill…people do. Is this the people we are?”
Just watch my man Dale.
Dallas sportscaster Dale Hansen gets to the heart of the current #TakeAKnee movement in classic Hansen fashion.
Via USAToday:
Donald Trump has said he supports a peaceful protest because it’s an American’s right. But not this protest, and there’s the problem: Any protest you don’t agree with is a protest that should be stopped.
Martin Luther King should have marched across a different bridge. Young, black Americans should have gone to a different college and found a different lunch counter. And college kids in the 60s had no right to protest an immoral war.
[snip]
The young, black athletes are not disrespecting America or the military by taking a knee during the anthem. They are respecting the best thing about America. It’s a dog whistle to the racists among us to say otherwise.
They, and all of us, should protest how black Americans are treated in this country. And if you don’t think white privilege is a fact, you don’t understand America.
Hansen concludes with the suggestion that “maybe we all need to read the Constitution again.”
Yet again, Dale Hansen for the win.
Watch below.
From one of the sanest men on TV, Texas sportscaster, Dale Hansen.
“Another shooting, another nut with a gun. My thoughts on the shooting at Wednesday’s congressional baseball practice.”
When people ask, “Where have all the heroes gone?” – I calmly point to Dale Hansen.
Watch below.
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Back in 2014, as sports pundits were having their yucks about newly out football player Michael Sam, WFAA’s venerable Dallas sportscaster Dale Hansen spoke truth to power regarding the new landscape ahead for professional sports team owners and challenged them to be wise moving forward.
Last night, Hansen delivered an op-ed on his newscast regarding Texas teen Mack Beggs, a transgender high school student who won his weight class in the state wrestling competition. Beggs was forced to wrestle in the girls’ division due to University Interscholastic League (UIL) rules.
The UIL holds that athletes must compete according to the information on their birth certificate. In this case, that meant Beggs had to compete in the girls division.
But UIL rules also state that no athlete may use performance enhancing drugs – like testosterone – unless they are prescribed by a doctor. Obviously, as Beggs is transitioning, he is taking testosterone under the care of his doctor.
All of this comes together in that Mack Beggs is not to “blame” for any of the inconsistencies here. This is a high school athlete who just wants to compete. Beggs had requested to wrestle in the boy’s division, but was denied.
But I’m not nearly as articulate as the ever-wise Hansen. Here’s the text via WFAA :
I would have thought in 2017 – or maybe I just hoped in 2017 – we would be done arguing about birth certificates… but obviously we’re not.
Seventeen-year old Mack Beggs, a junior at Euless Trinity who was born a girl and is now in the process of becoming a boy, wins the girls’ state wrestling tournament Saturday. So the argument has started again.
Mack wanted to wrestle against the boys. The UIL says he had to wrestle the girls. And that’s not fair for anybody involved in this argument.
Mack has been taking testosterone and it shows. There’s a reason we have rules in sports against steroids, and it was an incredibly unfair advantage for him. It was also unfair to the girls who had to wrestle him.
The question is, “When does a girl become a boy, and when does a boy become a girl?” or “When can you play games against those you identify with and not what a piece of paper says you are?”
That answer is way above my pay grade. But someone has to find a better answer than what we’re being given now.
As I said when I wrote about Missouri football player Michael Sam, I’m not always comfortable when a man tells me he’s gay. I don’t understand his world. But I do understand he’s a part of mine. And I am saying the same thing now about Mack Beggs.
Transitioning is a struggle I cannot imagine. It is a journey I could not make… and it is a life that too many cannot live.
The problems that Mack Beggs is facing and dealing with now remind me again that I don’t have any problems. He needs our support, and he does not need a group of old men in Austin telling him who to wrestle because of a genetic mix-up at birth.
We have argued long enough about birth certificates. It’s an argument that needs to end. You don’t have to understand – I myself don’t understand. But Mack Beggs is not the problem so many people make him out to be. He’s a child simply looking for his place in the world, and a chance to compete in the world.
Do we really not have the simple decency to allow him at least that? Because it seems to me it’s the very least we can do.
Watch below as Hansen reminds us how common sense and compassion come together.
Sportscaster Dale Hansen of Dallas’ WFAA has a history of speaking truth to his audience.
And in the wake of last night’s deadly shooting, he unleashed an unfiltered white light on the facts of what happened in downtown Dallas and how we got there.
You have to watch this.
Text of the video:
The Rangers lost to Minnesota last night, and I’m almost embarrassed to tell you I know that.
I’m in my office, watching the game, and then all hell breaks loose in our city.
Reporters in our newsroom were scrambling. Producers were yelling. We turned off the lights, just in case… and I kept watching the game.
It was another shooting in America. It was in our city this time and police officers were being killed, but it was a couple of blocks away and the Rangers were being shut out.
This is what I have become. This is what too many of us have been for a long time now.
We’ll fly our flags at half-mast, we’ll say all the right things, we’ll make promises we won’t keep, and then, nothing will change.
Our lives will go on, while the lives of so many others won’t, because we expect it now and we accept it.
It wasn’t this way when I was a boy, but it is life in America now.
But shooting a police officer is not the answer to a problem that too many people deny: Police officers are not like you and me — they’re better.
They run into the darkened alley where we won’t go. They run into the buildings we run from. They look for the person we try to hide from.
But they’re not allowed to make the human mistakes that we all make, because they have the power of God strapped to their hip and the authority to use it.
When we talk about blindly supporting the blue and when we try to show our support for these brave men and women, we fail to realize we can’t defend them all and we shouldn’t defend them all.
A white man in America doesn’t die for selling cigarettes on a street corner, he gets a ticket. A white man in America doesn’t die for driving with a broken tail light, he gets a ticket, too. And the officers who abuse the badge and the power they have should be punished, but too many times they are not.
But what possible purpose does opening fire on the streets of Dallas do to right the wrongs too many people deal with every day?
As one of those on the city streets last night told a reporter, the shooter might have killed the good cops.
A person of color has always hated to be painted with a broad brush — to suffer the indignity of the stereotype so many people claim as fact. And then that killer last night did exactly the same thing — shooting at anyone in blue, because don’t we all really know, they’re all the same.
America’s problem has come to Dallas now, and our lieutenant governor blames the peaceful protestors, because our lieutenant governor is a fool.
It was not just an attack on the Dallas police, it was an attack on our basic humanity and the common decency we used to cherish in America.
But that’s all gone now — we lost that a long time ago.
The Rangers lost last night, 10 to 1. And I’m almost embarrassed to tell you I know that.
I think Dale Hansen should have his own national TV show. He completely rocks.
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"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." – Albert Einstein. In case you missed it, this is why everyone is talking about Dale Hansen.Posted by WFAA-TV on Friday, February 27, 2015
Last year, veteran sportscaster Dale Hansen of Dallas/Fort Worth’s WFAA gained national attention when he addressed the issue of Michael Sam coming out before the NFL draft.
Hansen again brought his common-sense wisdom to the “Hansen Unplugged” segment of his telecast Tuesday in discussing a controversy in the Dallas suburb of Flower Mound.
At a recent basketball game against a rival, more racially diverse school, students were photographed last week holding up signs that read “White” and “Power.” Hansen addressed the issue and it’s origin.
Hansen chided the Flower Mound students’ parents who dismissed the dustup as nothing more than an accidental pairing of signs alongside each other. He shared that his granddaughter recalled attending games at Flower Mound where students would chant “Welfare babies, do you know who your daddy is? Because we know ours.”
He also reached back to his own upbringing in Iowa, where he said his mind was “twisted” by the contrast between his father’s constant and casual use of the “N-word” with praise for the only black family in the county where Hansen grew up.
“Kids have to be taught to hate and it’s our parents and grandparents, and our teachers and coaches, too, who teach us to hate,” Hansen said. “Kids become the product of that environment. I was. And they are.”
“The kids who hold the signs and chant their racist slurs — and it’s not all of them. It never is,” he said. “But their ignorance perpetuates the stereotype of all of us in Texas as a racist, ignorant people.”
Watch Hansen’s take-down below. And bravo once again, Mr. Hansen!
During the May 12 edition of CNN Tonight, anchor Bill Weir invited Texas sportscaster Dale Hansen, whose February speech in support of Sam created an Internet sensation, and the anti-gay Family Research Council’s (FRC) Ken Blackwell to discuss the drafting of Michael Sam and his celebratory kiss with his boyfriend.
As we’ve come to expect, Hansen was very articulate and stayed on the subject of a football player getting a chance to prove himself on the field.
But, during the segment, Blackwell tries to suggest that Sam kissed his boyfriend to help push an “agenda” and speculated that the kiss was a “political prophylactic” to protect Sam from getting fired. And Blackwell also veers into the underbrush by bringing up Tim Tebow who has nothing to do with the discussion.
While I know CNN was trying to have two sides to the conversation, even host Bill Weir looked a bit incredulous at some of Blackwell’s statements – WHICH basically followed the FRC’s usual talking points. Here’s just part of Blackwell’s screed about Michael Sam:
I thought the kiss was inappropriate and over the top, but I am just surprised with the duplicity among owners and leadership of the NFL. I take it it was just a few years ago when there were players who criticized Tim Tebow for wearing his faith on his sleeve. There were folks who basically said he was not a good football player; that’s why they were critical of him, not because he was a professed Christian who practiced his faith in all aspects of his life.
I really do question the network’s judgment, editorial judgment in putting the kiss on — on TV. Look, this is a very clear opportunity for Mr. Sam and others to co-op a professional sports, in this case the NFL, as a platform and as a force multiplier for advancing their agenda.
Let me just say that I hope he hasn’t created a political prophylactic that will shield his inability to make the team as a football player — as a football player because he’s an advocate for a lifestyle.
Two-time AP Sportscaster of the Year Dale Hansen’s fantastic defense of Michael Sam’s coming out went viral earlier this year, and now he’s got a thing or two to say about Sam being the 249th pick in the NFL draft.
Hansen doesn’t buy that 248 players were “better” than the SEC Defensive Player of the Year.
He’s got some choice words for the folks who melted down after the kiss between Sam and his boyfriend Vito.
Dale also skewers the idea that Michael Sam is going to be “making moves” on other players in the locker room.
“I do not understand why so many people are so afraid of a gay man in an NFL locker room. I think the other players are gonna be okay. I’ve worked with gay men in my station and in my department for more than 40 years now and not one of those guys has ever hit on my and I’m starting to get a little ticked off about it.”
I think the best part of this whole op-ed is that Dale is in Texas.
Watch this. Dale Hansen rocks.
Ellen today sat down with Texas sports anchor Dale Hansen, whose on-air opinion piece regarding newly out college football player Michael Sam and the NFL went viral this week.
You can see his BRILLIANT “Unplugged” op-ed here.
Says Hansen to Ellen: “I just wanted to slam the hypocrisy of the NFL!”