Laura Robson, the rainbow hairband and evangelical Christians

The offending hairband - actually it didn't
offend anyone but the Guardian wants you
to think it did. 

British tennis player Laura Robson has been in the news this week, not so much for losing in the first round of the Australian open (that's pretty much a given for British players, sadly), but because she wore a rainbow-coloured hairband because, in her words, "I believe in equal rights for everyone."


This probably wouldn't normally have excited comment except that gay rights activists had called for people to take rainbow coloured flags into the stadium, which is named after Margaret Court, a great Australian tennis player who now pastors a pentecostal church and last month described gay people as engaging in "abominable sexual practices."


A few observations...


1 Assuming that political and/or religious symbols (and there's no doubt that the rainbow as a symbol of gay rights is both political and, in a sense, religious) are permitted by the organisers of the tournament Laura Robson had every right to wear a rainbow hairband and shouldn't be criticised for doing so. I imagine they are as I'm pretty sure I've seen players wearing crosses. If such symbols aren't permitted the tennis governing body needs to deal with the issue accordingly.


2 Margaret Court's comments about homosexuality (such as: "I've nothing against homosexual people. I help them to overcome. We have people [at the Victory Life Centre] who have been homosexual who are now married.") probably sound rather insensitive even to my more evangelical readers. It's important that we understand that the reason for this is not, I think, that she is 'homophobic' (which in our culture is largely a word used to mean 'critical of anything a gay person does in relation to their sexuality') but that like many people in churches like Victory Life Centre she has an over-realised eschatology; her expectation is that many (most) of the problems that afflict us in this life - including issues of sexuality - ought to be resolved in this life. This is, of course, a view that takes too much from one set of Bible texts and not enough from another. It fails to find a biblical balance between the wonderful power of Christ now and the struggles with sin and living in a messed up world.


3 To have this whole debate around women's tennis, several of whose most decorated and adulated stars are gay (Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King among them), seems slightly ironic as it provides at least some evidence that homosexuality is not necessarily a bar to progress; though I am sure there are prejudiced people in tennis as there are everywhere else in the world. A bit like western evangelical Christians western homosexuals are prone to seeing persecution everywhere!

4 The real problem in the story, as reported by the Guardian, is that despite the claim of a "political row" that snagged the readers' attention in the first sentence, not one single person quoted in the article or anywhere else that I can find, actually criticised Robson for wearing the hairband. In other words this "reigniting" is in reality a "row" manufactured by a newspaper to make it sound like nasty evangelical Christians are persecuting a 17 year old tennis player - when they totally aren't!