Sports, to me, means people celebrating the kind of thugs that beat me and hounded me most of my young life. The only "friendly confines" are the places where people can get away from everything involving sports.

The only small facet of sports I ever liked was Howard Cossel, because he spoke truth to power. That meant supporting Muhammed Ali when everyone turned against him, and his refusing to cover boxing when he decided the corruption and the phoniness of the sport was sickening him. The reporters that followed in his wake, who write intense personal articles for Sports Illustrated for example, have helped me to...well, not like sports, but not to fear sports people so much.

And I especially relate to what you said, because I'm one of the people who keep pointing out how little Heather Havrilesky cares about anything in her TV columns. But the positions you mentioned in your post are reversed. She's the hater. I'm the one passionate about TV, which (unlike sports) is the real civilizing and uniting experience in America. Possibly the last one.

So I understand what Mr, Kaufman feels, even though his love for sports is foreign and a little frightening to me. It's hard to love in the face of hate, but you have to.

I'm making a stab at writing a novel. I felt the need to work through my feelings with the female protagonist, a woman far more attractive than I am, who suddenly has sexual opportunities opened to her that I never had.

So I wrote deliberately graphic sequences of her having sex. And having written them, and expurging that part of my deliberations, I saved it in a separate file and kept it out of my main working text. If I ever think the novel is good enough to submit, it will most definitely not have those sexual sequences.

But the killer turned his in, and was proud of what he had written. And the teachers, smarter than ninety-nine percent of the idiots that America allows to teach in schools, tried to intervene. But the American educational system, run by the other ninety-nine percent, let it pass.

I was in high school in 1970, when there were attempts to extend the college "moratorium" protests against Vietnam to high schools. Kids deciding to prove how politically aware they were did not attend. A small group of conservatives passed out a list of the people who didn't attend and called their protest an affront to getting an education.

Both of them were idiots. So are the people in this protest. Did some misguided theatre major think of "silence" as an appropriate way to respond to gay bashing? Although I'm not gay (and saying that doesn't matter worth a damn, 'cause I'm ugly and unloveable to any sex) even I know that the Stonewall incident didn't involve silence and passivity. Maybe it made these students feel all noble and Ghandi-like by being silent, but social change inside a society isn't what Ghandi tried to affect. He was trying to affect outside forces and he had his society behind him.

As for the counter-protest, even if these people were motivated by genuine beliefs of their religion, and they sought only to have their message heard, they should not be surprised that genuine bigots stood by their side and used their beliefs as a cover for exercising their hatred. Their "truth" has been used by people who don't care about truth, Christ, or anything even remotely positive. Good going, Christians.

I normally expect Havrilesky to hate everyone, but for a woman to joke about rape - in print, in a publication read by a group of people with more than Brain One - is upsetting. And this remark seems very much like Don Imus's ugly statement, in that it is unjustified and undeservedly cruel.

However, Imus reportedly was led astray by his producer, who encouraged him to be more and more outrageous. That's Imus's excuse, anyway. We won't know for sure until we hear Imus when he returns to the air somewhere without that producer.

In this case, let's say Havrilesy was sloppy and didn't reconsider changing an unfortunte phrase before she posted. Give her a pass on this. Don't protest. It won't do any good. It's not like she gives a damn for any of the people who read her column, anyway. But this will make monitoring her submissions for phrases like "nappy-headed chickens" a much more rewarding hobby.