This is chillingly reminiscent of the Up Stairs Lounge massacre, but with a far happier ending. On New Year’s Eve in Seattle, somebody poured gasoline on the carpeted stairs to a crowded second-floor gay nightclub and tossed a match on it. Fortunately, some quick-thinking soldiers thwarted the attempted historical reenactment.

(For those who don’t know, the Up Stairs Lounge in New Orleans was a gay bar that was the target of a terrible arson attack in the 1970s. It’s an important part of our history as LGBT folks and worth at least knowing about. The Wikipedia entry is informative and not too upsetting, but be warned before searching further than Wikipedia that the details and photographs available online are horrifying and the stuff of nightmares.)

Also fortunately, the Seattle club was sprinklered and had multiple fire exits. Yay for modern fire codes, too. And for newspapers that will report on these things and police departments that will investigate them, neither of which we had in the 1970s.

From a lengthy and rather snotty harangue on Breitbart.com a few days ago:

Let us assume [Chris] Kluwe’s recollection is correct and Vikings top brass was not happy with his advocacy. Let us even assume that is what led to his being released from the team.

So what?

What Kluwe fails to grasp, as many in today’s society often do, is that NFL teams are private organizations: as such, they can release an employee for any reason that is not contrary to the law (e.g., race) and is not contractually forbidden. Moreover, the contracts players often sign with the teams include all manner of behavioral clauses, likely including that the player’s actions on-and-off the field not reflect poorly on the team. Oh, and did I mention the players have a very strong union that protects them? Somehow, however, Kluwe wishes for the reader to believe he is a victim of homophobes and cowardly-servants-of-homophoboes who wouldn’t just let-Chris-be-Chris.

If Kluwe’s stance was bringing unwanted attention onto the Vikings, and angering or alienating some Viking fans (which his views clearly did), the team would have been well within its rights to release him, if only from a purely public-relations-nightmare angle.

So let me be sure I’ve got this straight. If you’re suspended for a couple of weeks between episodes from your television series because you’ve made antigay statements, that’s a violation of your First Amendment rights. If you’re fired permanently from your football team because you’ve made progay statements, that’s a perfectly reasonable response to the offense you gave to some of your team’s fans.

Hooookay.

(Also: Is it just me, or should somebody really lock down the hyphen on this guy’s keyboard for his own protection?)