An example of what Steve McConkey considers discrimination, bullying, harassment, etc.

My continuing analysis of Madison, Wisconsin Christian bigot* Steve McConkey, an openly wasteful adventure that to him constitutes harassment because he can neither refute nor erase it, led me to another of Steve’s Christian Newswire specials, or as Steve calls them, worldwide news releases out of Washington, D.C. These are the breathless and unintentionally comical productions that Steve and other credulous yokels for Jesus pay $80 or more to have flung at various Internet inboxes and printed in a different font, with all misspellings and other mistakes left helpfully intact. Some of these florid narratives are picked up by loons of a similar orientation; collectively, these fringe entrepreneurs desperate to reap the rewards of nonstop whining and lying are ignored by bigots of consequence,  because most everyday bigots are merely unpleasant and dislike crazies as much as everyone else.

One of these outlets decided to spruce up Steve’s original headline and blast it at readers in all-caps (top part of the image below). You’d swear from this stuff that linebackers and drag queens were lining up together outside conservative churches and smashing in car windshields with bats in the parking lots. Or maybe just pointing at each other’s crotches.

What if everyone who answered a knock at the door to an uninvited envoy for some version of Jesus or another started complaining en masse about being harassed by weirdos? If someone came to your door to ask you to accept that everyone driving a foreign car will be set on fire at some point, you’d have every reason to alert someone with a badge or a net, and that story has no less to back it up than prattle about a dead Jew coming back to life and soaring into the sky like a superhero, but one with with crippling social anxiety based on his track record of not coming back every time someone in the know says he will. He’s 2,000 years late as it is.

In terms of the post itself, I have to first underscore what’s been obvious from the start to virtually everyone following this shit except for Steve himself: No one takes “press releases” (or really, any attempt at persuasion) seriously when they’re written in the third person, even without the jarring grammatical infelicities Steve cannot help but pepper into his crackpot grievances. This practice is especially precarious when the material includes direct quotations, which instead of adding gravitas only underscores the lunacy (and, let’s face it, the comedy) of the entire presentation. “Steve must not be a Seinfeld fan,” Beck observed. “Is quoting yourself when you’re the ‘reporter’ even a thing?”

The NFL is coming against the state of Georgia

OK, the “press release” battle has already been lost, and again, if Steve can’t grasp this far into his career as an obscure public crank why this is, he never will. But still, try to imagine what this alleged insurgence would even look like. If it’s supposed to be a metaphor, it flops (and Steve isn’t known for his use of rhetorical devices, mangled or otherwise).

for potentially passing a bill that would protect Christians who do not support gay marriage. The NFL is joined by the NBA and NCAA. 

If correctly worded and spared the font assigned here by default to irredeemable knuckleheads, this would read, “a bill that would allow Christians to engage in otherwise illegal discrimination.” Either it should be illegal for all of us to practice certain forms of discrimination or it should be illegal for none of us, period. It doesn’t take a genius to foresee problems with granting humans who are already intent on being assholes these kind of loopholes. Bill Clinton was a shitweasel in various well-described ways; as with all male pols, most of these relate to where he stuck his gigglestick and under what circumstances, but he doesn’t get enough heat for signing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It’s hard to think of a law more regressive than “You can only be a next-level bastard if you ascribe your prejudices to an imaginary adjudicator.”

Also note that in the course of this screed, Steve doesn’t even describe even briefly  what HB 757 proposed. In essence, it would have allowed, among other things, employers to fire employees for being gay — provided, of course, those employers could waggle a Bible around in defense of this stance.

(Photo: 4 Winds president, Steve McConkey)

You don’t say. If nothing else, this whole exchange has led me to wonder if it’s possible to be formally classified as a narcissist if your every boast and reference to yourself is cringe-comedy to the world at large. I’d say yes: Even if no one believes you and you’re only embarrassing yourself, it still counts. Being a narcissist with no detectable positive qualities must be like being addicted to chocolate, but only in the form of Ex-Lax.

The NFL is threatening to move a potential Super Bowl from Georgia to another state if the bill is passed. NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy and Atlanta Falcon’s owner Arthur Blank are trying to stop House Bill 757 that would protect Christians.

Well, there’s more than one player on the Atlanta NFL franchise, and to my knowledge this was true in 2016. Also, there is no evidence McCarthy was personally agitating against the bill; Steve is again blindly accusing someone of malfeasance and in this case shooting at a messenger.

And you might ask, “Protect Christians from what?” (although at this point, I would hope the fuck not and am merely trying to flavor the narrative). The answer is “nothing.”

The bill has passed both houses of the Georgia Legislature, but has not been signed by Republican Gov. Nathan Deal. Many Georgia businesses are against the bill including Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola, Google, Home Depot, Porsche, and Wells Fargo.

One week later, Deal vetoed the bill. It would have been a surprise move considering his party status, other than the fact that every corporation and entity in the world not fronted by right-wing Christopaths was against the bill and Deal can’t run for re-election anyway. I should also credit him with possibly meaning what he said about Republicans needing to acknowledge that the world is changing around them and other ecumenical niceties. From a politician in the Deep South? Hell’s bells.

This is another example of the gay agenda coming out against Christians. The NFL and other sport associations, plus big business, are joining forces with the gay elite establishment to penalize Christians if they do not support homosexuality. This is an attack on Christian freedom.

I took the quotes out because they’re pointless. This doesn’t seem to render Steve’s farcical declarations any more or less intelligible (“gay agenda coming out against” is priceless). Steve is claiming that the world is trying force Christians to change their views on homosexuality and stop being assholes in general. His evidence for this is that businesses were making their antagonistic feelings about a piece of discriminatory legislation known in the same way the Christian mob was praying madly for its passage. (Score another one for being on your knees, suckas.)

It’s unclear what the “this” refers to in “this is an attack on Christian freedom,” which in turn may or may not be synonymous with “penalize Christians” in McConkish. Maybe he means having the Super Bowl elsewhere is depriving Christians of their livelihood somehow? And since when is the NFL beholden to the interests of Christian extremists? (Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide. Anyone still howling to the moon about it is an extremist, especially when it’s clear the person is divorced from objective reality independent of his claimed religious convictions.)

The truth is that Steve sees any attempt to prevent “Christians” like himself from trampling on other people for how they choose to deploy their stinkmeat as bullying, repression, and worse. This is why he is absolutely apoplectic that I exist and chronicle his meanderings in intentionally unkind, foul and sweeping language. I also like to make Steve think of having another man’s tongue jammed up (into?) his anus when he didn’t even realize there was someone else upside-down in the same church-retreat sleeping bag. Ouch!

I myself know no Christians who personally feel attacked or targeted by the enacting of pro-gay rights laws, even if they  disagree with those laws (the most common example being same-sex marriage). Most people are used to the government not acting in accordance with their every whim. Infantile paranoiacs with a disturbingly parochial view of the world do not have so easy a time adjusting to reality.

Only a truly dead and hopeless person can genuinely perceive a league’s refusal to take an interest in its athletes’ sex lives as promoting homosexuality or giving anyone special favors. Steve is that one far-gone wacko who exists mostly as a cliche’ for liberals to swat at, the clown who yab-yab-yabbers continually about the persecution of Christians in America,  unable to comprehend that the rest of us don’t have to succumb to the whims of the contemptuous celestial fag-basher he fancies having powered his decades-long demented mission to deprive others of their freedoms.

4 Winds Christian Athletics is a sports ministry located near the University of Wisconsin football stadium in Madison. They stand up for Christian athletes worldwide.

In 2003, Steve McConkey was the only sports minister publicly standing against the International Olympic Committee for allowing transgenders in the Olympics. He has publicly opposed the International Olympic Committee, USA Olympic Committee, NCAA, and other associations for their support of homosexuality.

McConkey recently protested the IOC because they changed their transgender policies to allow men to compete as women with only a year of hormone therapy, reversing the 2003 rule requiring surgery and two years of hormone therapy.

By no meaningful definition is this a “sports ministry” or Steve a “sports minister.” He’s a guy who ran track at a D3 school two generations ago who now sits at home trying to find ways to marginalize gays, atheists and even Buddhists while waiting for the donations to, uh, roll in.

Have a gander at the 4 Winds site overall. Once you get past the jarring effect of looking at whatever nutbag headlines are currently posted and check out Steve’s bio, you’ll notice that, just as he doesn’t support any of his florid accusations of being stalked or harassed, he can’t even lend credibility to has comparatively benign claims because he doesn’t to other pages, and if you go Googling, you won’t find anything flattering about Steve McConkey that’s not by Steve McConkey.

He may be aware that people with credibility don’t build personal websites with no external links, and simply can’t do anything about this besides maintain a site filled with fever dreams of hallucinated triumphs and patent bullshit. For example, if Steve had ever had conversations with people of influence at the International Olympic Committee, there would be evidence of this besides Steve reminding us that Steve shouts regularly at the IOC. After four decades of watching the world go in precisely the opposite direction of his “work,” he’s desperate to believe he has agency. I am in some small way granting  him that status by giving him a target, one that will actually interact with him. People like him would rather be hated than ignored. I kind of get that, because I regularly choose to engage low-hanging fruit (or in the case of Kim Duclos, carry a legitimate defense against bullshit claims to gleefully abusive extremes) to prove I’m in the right at the expense of my dignity and time better spent doing virtually any other kind of writing.

What I’m waiting for is to see what happens if and when people theoretically in Steve’s corner start pushing for evidence of anyone harassing him. Or asking him about that time he said his supposed stalker was on mental disability. Or getting hi to explain why so much of what he’s written lately, especially about the innocent bystander in this, is now gone That’s partly why I’m giving him every reason to perpetuate this at his end rather than drop it. He likes to erase what he writes weeks, days, even hours after he posts it, but that only works when you don’t have a half-dozen gadflies screen-capping your every electronic croak. Let’s see what he does when he’s pushed to show how Godly he really is to the world, even the weirdos who fester on his Facebook timeline.

*Steve is cool with this label. Also, this is a parodic homage of sorts to his tendency to identify people he dislikes by a combination of their city of residence and their distance from firebrand, end-stage Christianity.