When news broke that the highly-publicized death of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Teo’s girlfriend had never actually occurred, and that the girlfriend herself did not actually exist, one of the first things many people asked was about his sexuality. ABC host Katie Couric asked Te’o whether he was gay in his first public interview after the story broke, to which he replied, “No, far from it, far from it.”

But now National Football League teams want to know the same thing of the projected first-round draft pick at the league’s annual scouting combine, according to NBC and Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio, who told radio host Dan Patrick that the issue of Te’o's sexuality has become “the elephant in the room” for NFL teams interested in drafting him. CBSSports.com’s Mike Freeman has the transcript, part of which is here:

“On the field, you still have to account for what happened in the BCS National Championship Game against Alabama,” Florio told the Dan Patrick Show. “Here’s the elephant in the room for the teams and it shouldn’t matter, but we have to step aside from the rest of reality and walk into the unique industry that is the NFL. Teams want to know whether Manti Te’o is gay. They just want to know. They want to know because in an NFL locker room, it’s a different world. It shouldn’t be that way.” [...]

Patrick interrupted Florio to ask: “You’re telling me that you’re hearing from teams who want to know this, but how do you ask it? Are they trying to find a finesse way to ask that question, or are they going to do investigative work on finding out if Manti Te’o is gay?”

Florio said: “It’s been described to me as the proverbial elephant in the room and I don’t think anyone knows how to solve this dilemma yet. It’s just that they want to know what they’re getting. They want to know what issues they may be dealing with down the road. We just assumed that at some point there would be an openly gay player in an NFL locker room and the team would have to work with the realities and make sure that everything’s fine.”

In 2011, the NFL and the NFL Players Association added sexual orientation to the league’s nondiscrimination statute, effectively barring NFL teams from using sexuality as a factor in employment decisions, so if NFL teams are asking Te’o about his sexuality, they could be in violation of that policy. But even if it isn’t, and even if that statute didn’t exist, NFL teams shouldn’t be asking that question. Though there are no openly gay players in the NFL, multiple former players have opened up about their sexuality after retirement. The teams have no right or reason to know about a player’s private life, especially when it won’t affect the way he plays the game he is being paid to play.

But the NFL teams who asked this question aren’t alone in being wrong. So is Florio. He insisted repeatedly in the interview with Patrick that “it shouldn’t matter” if Te’o is gay, and yet he passed on the fact that Te’o was being judged based in part on his sexuality, openly speculating that Te’o may in fact be gay while hiding behind anonymous sources to do it. Granting anonymity to those sources and their concerns about Te’o's personal life gave the queries an air of legitimacy, even though asking not to be named is a tacit admission that asking about Te’o's sexuality is something these sources would be embarrassed to do in public. In effect, they’ve persuaded Florio to do it for them. But if Florio truly believes “it shouldn’t matter,” he ought to treat it like that by condemning the questions instead of acting as a stalking horse for them. Instead, Florio painted Te’o's situation as a “dilemma” and a “distraction” that he and his future team will have to overcome.

Te’o, like every other player at the combine, should be judged on his performance, both on the field and in his interviews. But invasive questions about his sexuality shouldn’t be a part of that process, both because he has already answered them and because even if he (or any other player) were gay, it is his choice to decide whether, and how, he wants to open up publicly about it. One would hope that when a gay player does talk openly about his sexuality, he would be supported by his teammates, his team, and the league, and treated fairly and responsibly by reporters like Florio. Unfortunately, this episode makes it obvious that the NFL hasn’t yet reached that point.

Beasts of the Southern Wild star and youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis is a lovely little girl who shows plenty of signs of turning into a reliable talent and a charming presence on the awards-season publicity circuit. And for some reason, she became the target of some of the most unpleasant jokes both during last night’s Academy Awards and in the commentary about them.

Seth MacFarlane cracked that “to give you an idea of how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.” It was a line that could have been at Clooney’s expense, if it hadn’t seemed so congratulatory—both MacFarlane and Clooney have a tendency to date much younger women. And as I wrote earlier today, MacFarlane immediately defused any sense that he was going after Clooney by tossing him a mini-bottle. Mega-stars, it seems, must be protected from any hurt feelings or criticism, but little girls? Not so much. Things got worse later in the evening when the Onion’s twitter feed Tweeted, and subsequently deleted “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a c—, right? #Oscars2013.” It was jarring and appalling to see that kind of language directed at a nine-year old girl, even if there’s a world where the concept of the joke could have been funny. Suggesting that a little girl who carries purses shaped like puppies and has a habit of flexing adorably on the red carpet or when the camera comes to her is secretly a Machiavellian schemer or a diva is a reasonable joke to me, and a similar schtick was a long-running and successful plot point on 30 Rock. It even could have been a riff on the irrational haterade directed actresses like Anne Hathaway. But the Onion’s choice of sexual, nasty language blew up that possibility: it was programming to the character length, not the actual quality of the gag.

To the publication’s credit, the Onion appears to have realized this. The company’s CEO, Steve Hannah, just published a Facebook post asking for Wallis’ forgiveness:

I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting. No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire. The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible. Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

But beyond the Onion’s apology, it’s worth thinking more deeply about why the attempts at satire aimed at Wallis went so badly last night.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 24 episode of The Walking Dead.

The Walking Dead took a break from the last few weeks of moral dilemmas this Sunday, but it didn’t leave hefty topics behind. “I Ain’t A Judas” was a meditation on the causes of war and peace; why do groups of people sometimes organize to kill each other while others coexist?

Zombie fiction has proven fertile grounds for analysts of world politics. Dan Drezner, a professor of international relations, has written a widely acclaimed book using zombies to explain international relations theory (his conclusions are summarized here). While Drezner’s work focuses on how currently-existing governments would respond to a zombie outbreak, The Walking Dead asks us how the proto-governments that form in a world of total social breakdown would relate to each other.

In keeping with the show’s broadly morbid aesthetic, Sunday’s episode gives us a grim answer. The prisoners and Woodburyites appear to be dead set on marching down the road to total war despite the best efforts of Andrea, who embarks on a lonely peace mission to the prison against the Governor’s wishes. “I Ain’t A Judas” suggests Andrea’s quest was doomed to failure; the anarchic, dangerous structure of the world and the history between the groups seems to have made deadly violence a certainty.

The first, and most important, reason that war is coming is the nasty combination of stakes and poor information. In keeping with what’s called a “offensive realist” theory of international relations, neither Rick nor the Governor knows enough about the other side’s capabilities or intentions to safely stay off war footing. Rick’s poor excuses for spies, Merle and Andrea, suggest the Governor is powerful and well-armed. Indeed, given Merle’s depiction of the Governor as omnipresent tactical genius, Rick is getting the sense that moving away from war, even for a moment, could expose them. The Governor, having already lost a number of people to Rick’s raids, begins drafting child soldiers. For both sides, preparing for violence is the only rational thing to do.
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Seth MacFarlane’s performance as an Oscar host last night was a perfect advertisement for MacFarlane’s brand of humor. He opened with a number about the fact that he—and we as audiences—have seen female Academy Award nominees’ breasts. It was a bit that could have been a perceptive riff about the fact that women are asked to get naked, and to get naked in different ways, than their male counterparts, and could have tweaked the 77 percent of Academy voters who are men for voting for those roles, rather than recognizing female actors for performances that are non-sexual. Instead, he went in an entirely different direction that made for a faster, but not nearly as deep joke, bringing in the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. A comedic sensibility that goes to Boobs + Gay Men Who Don’t Like Boobs = Hilarity may be commercially viable, but it’s as fleeting as adolescence.

From there, MacFarlane dug in as hard as he could have on one of the few comedic lanes he’s capable of working in. He used Quvenzhané Wallis, who is nine, to make a joke about George Clooney’s fondness for dating younger women, then tossed him a drink as if to reassure one of Hollywood’s most powerful and respected actors that he’d never actually make a crack at Clooney‘s expense. He suggested that Jennifer Anniston is hiding a past as a stripper. He made jokes about actresses throwing up to fit into their dresses. He thought it was funny that Javier Bardem has an accent. I’m no Chris Brown fan, but even MacFarlane’s joke about Brown was badly constructed, saying “Django is a movie where a woman is subjected to violence, or as we call it, a Chris Brown and Rihanna date movie,” ignoring the fact that Django is a movie where a woman of color is subjected to tremendous violence by white men and saved by a heroic black man who is taking on a chivalric role that was previously specifically reserved for white men.

What bothers me more than anything else about these jokes is how boring they are. I’ve heard variations of them countless times from people who think they’re hilarious, and act as if no one has ever unearthed such comedic gems before, and they’re always wrong. They are the scraps of humor actual comics left on the table a decade earlier in their careers after they learned that playing to people’s dumbest, most stereotypical assumptions is not actually the same thing as joke-making. But the laziness of MacFarlane’s brand played particularly poorly at the Oscars given the movie industry’s very real problems with both women and derivativeness, in a celebration of what’s supposed to be Hollywood’s best, the things that the profits of things like The Avengers make it possible to keep in production.
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