Football Player Flagged for thanking God for a touchdown!

Wed Dec 01 03:02pm EST

Washington player penalized for pointing to heavens after TD

By Cameron Smith

Well, it finally happened: Penalties for excessive celebration have officially jumped the shark. If the NFL is the No Fun League, it's still a celebratory paradise compared to the Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association. That was made clear when a Tumwater (Wash.) High running back was flagged for excessive celebration after he pointed to the heavens following a touchdown run on Monday night.

The play, which you see above, happened in the second quarter of Tumwater's 63-27 victory against East Valley in the Washington 2A state semifinals. According to KOMO News, running back Ronnie Hastie scored on a 23-yard run and celebrated as he has following each of his touchdowns this year: by pointing to the heavens.

That's when the field judge tossed a penalty flag, telling the running back he was trying to draw attention to himself with the celebration.

"That wasn't the point [of the gesture], so I guess I was a little confused," Hastie told KOMO News. "I do that to give glory to my Heavenly Father, Jesus. He gives me the strength. He's the one who gives me these abilities in the first place."

Making matters even more strange, the WIAA refuses to decry the penalty, saying that until the referees' association gives it the full context of the play it can't determine whether it was an excessive celebration or not. In fact, even if it was, it says the penalty still might have been justified because Hastie did not immediately give the ball back to a referee.

"The point is to make sure the game goes on, that something that happens after a score or after a spectacular play or whatever doesn't slow down play itself," WIAA executive director Mike Colbrese told KOMO.

[Rewind: NFL's Chris Johnson impersonates T.O. during TD celebration in Dallas]

Yet that explanation is patently ridiculous. By those standards, any time a player spiked the ball or did anything following a touchdown except sprint with the ball directly to the referee, that player would be justifying a penalty against him. What if the player just dropped the ball once he reached the end zone? Is that an unsportsmanlike penalty? It sure sounds like it according to those standards.

This isn't the first issue that has popped up this year with Washington officials. In late October, referees in the Seattle area used pink whistles in support of charitable efforts to raise money for breast cancer awareness. In response, the Washington Officials Association said that the pink whistles were a violation of uniform code, and threatened to ban the officials who used them in game action for a playoff game, which would have cost the officials a game check. The issue was eventually resolved without any officials being fined or banned from game action.

Of course, this isn't the first time that a player giving thanks in the end zone has been attacked for a religious moment, either. Last fall, a Penn State player took a knee in the end zone after running onto the field, something a number of players from high school to the NFL do each week. Instead of saying a prayer alone and trotting off the field, he was mocked by Goldie Gopher, the University of Minnesota's mascot who was parading around his team's end zone.

At least in the case of Goldie Gopher, the University of Minnesota immediately apologized for their mascot's action. Until the WIAA does that to Hastie, the running back said he'll take his post touchdown devotion off the field.

[Video: Most over-the-top touchdown celebrations]

"I'll just have to change it up and not make as big of a statement, I guess. The refs are in charge," Hastie told KOMO of how he'd react to touchdowns in Tumwater's 2A state title game against Archbishop Murphy on Saturday. "I'll just point to the sky once I'm off the field."

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Trouble At the Smithsonia

WASHINGTON, D.C.— "There's been an entire history hiding in plain sight," National Portrait Gallery historian David C. Ward told ABC News earlier this week. "Telling the history of art without the history of gay people is like telling the history of slavery without mentioning black people." Well, no. Ward was speaking of "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," an exhibition that he co-curated with National Portrait Gallery curator Jonathan Katz at museum, which explores how gender and sexual identity have influenced modern American art. But being gay is not a prerequisite for being an artist — no matter what some more conservative fringes of the United States may think about the convention-flouting art world — while being black was a requirement for being a slave. Also: at this point, exactly how hidden is the supposedly clandestine history of gays in art?

New York alternative space White Columns recently presented "Act Up New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993," exploring the work of graphic designers and artists who called attention to the politics of the epidemic and its effects on the marginalized gay community. We all know that the ranks of gay artists include such towering figures from Praxiteles, Leonardo da Vinci, and Caravaggio to Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly, and we have all, at times, been fascinated by their overlapping romantic ventures. Artistic depictions of homosexual sex acts have been commonplace for years, and yet they continue to make headlines, inspiring heated debate — from the early 1990s Culture Wars over Robert Mapplethorpe's graphic "X Portfolio" to recent instances of censorship in Russia over the Blue Noses's work "Kissing Policemen (An Epoch of Clemency)." To put it another way, discussions of sexuality in art may still be filled with bigotry and misplaced fury, but they certainly are not stifled or secret.

What the new show offers, an exhibition statement proposes, are abstracted or discreet depictions of the issues at hand. The show's organizers take the twin (vague) themes of "gender and sexuality" and use them to gather together work by some of the greatest artists of the past century, taking a sweeping look at variously coded identities by artists whose own sexual orientations run the gamut from strictly homosexual to strictly heterosexual. The result is that the 105 works on display in the show, which will run through February 13, don't obviously cohere, or rarely cohere in the same way to the proposed theme.

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