c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ John Rocker is a baseball player of some considerable talent who is now in the deep muddy because of comments he made to a sportswriter while riding around New York City as to why he would not want to live there.

He doesn’t seem to want to be around gays, foreigners, immigrants, blacks, and folks of other hue. I will not judge whether Mr. Rocker is a bigot, but his remarks certainly sound like bigotry.

If he is a bigot, he’s not a very bright one because he trusted a journalist, almost always a mistake and especially if its a sports journalist.

Exactly why the American people need to know about Rocker’s prejudices is not immediately obvious. I’m inclined to suspect the writer tricked him into making the comments which caused his team to send him off for psychiatric counseling because of”public outrage.” I have not, incidentally, heard any public outrage except from the folks whose job it is to express outrage and from sports columnists _ folks who are some of the most vicious human beings in all the world.

Most people I suspect don’t care what a baseball player says or does so long as he performs with some skill on the field. Nor can I imagine that anyone seriously believes that a baseball player’s nutty ideas have any impact on anyone else. Who cares what he thinks?

More to the point, bigots have the right to express their opinions, however misguided they may be. A bigot, even a bigoted baseball player, does not lose his right to freedom of speech.

Rocker is a role model? Gimme a break. No one believes that about athletes any more. Rocker is simply another victim to the media-driven feeding frenzy that periodically occurs when a celebrity says something politically incorrect. We must gather round him in a ritual and cast him into the darkness outside without paying any attention to the possibility the opinions he expresses are in fact American public policy.

So if John Rocker is banned from baseball and is seeking another career, I suggest he run for Congress on the Republican ticket because he will feel right at home with the evangelical bigots who currently dominate Congress.

They don’t like foreigners either, especially foreigners with a skin color that is not pure white. They don’t like gays and want to keep them out of the military. They especially don’t like Chinese. They have passed some of the most vile laws in our history to punish immigrants.

Has anyone suggested their opinions, expressed in somewhat more genteel language but substantially the same as Rocker’s, should drive them to a psychiatrist’s couch?

Moreover, his sentiments on gays and immigrants are supported by large majorities of American citizens who articulate them with impunity in daily life outside the circles where such sentiments are inhibited by the guardians of what is politically correct.

Our immigration policy, enacted by the Republican Congress and enthusiastically supported by the American people, deliberately breaks up families and is applied with astonishing cruelty. It is not only vile, it is stupid.

One walks up and down a street and through a mall and sees”help wanted”signs everywhere. If the current prosperity continues, there will be more such signs. We desperately need immigrants if a labor shortage is not going to generate inflation. Europe, it has been reported, will need 35 million foreign workers if it is to sustain its present economic growth through the next 20 years. Some observers think Europeans will forego economic growth if the cost is more foreigners ruining their ethnic purity.

We laugh at their stupidity but we are embarked on exactly the same policy. It is not a question of whether the United States can absorb more immigrants; the question is how can we do without them.

Patently I make no case for John Rocker’s bigotry. And no case either for those hypocrites who pretend to be shocked about it while they ignore the fact that similar opinions are the position of the Congress of the United States and the American people.

John Rocker, it seems, is an all-American.

DEA END GREELEY