Coulter, not soccer, to blame for country’s moral decay

Christine Flowers

Wednesday, July 16, 2014 | 2 a.m.

Ann Coulter knows how to get our attention, which is not always a good thing. Nikita Kruschev got our attention, as did Miley Cyrus, Sandra Fluke and George Zimmerman. The mere fact that we’re listening is not a propitious sign. However, it does mean that whatever falls from Ann’s mouth will generally be talked about by the sort of people who either think she is a goddess of common sense or who think she peddles horse manure.

I don’t fall into either category. To me, the objectively brilliant pundit with an Ivy League pedigree and “Little Mermaid” hair is neither a paragon nor a virago. She is simply a woman with strong opinions who has figured out how to promote them, and herself, like no public figure since Madonna (the taxidermied rock icon, not the original one.)

Exhibit A: this column, which I doubt she’ll read. But that’s OK. She’s not my audience. You are.

So this is what I have to say about Ann Coulter, who recently made some suspiciously timely comments about how soccer is leading to the moral decay of the United States.

According to Ann, soccer is responsible for babies having sex with each other, women getting stiffed (no pun intended) on their birth control budget, spoiled high school students seeking both emancipation and compensation from their parents, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the legalization of pot, botched executions, politicians who kiss women-not-their-wives, puppy mills, cellulite, the Kardashian family, the Jenner family, illegal alien families and ...

Oh. Well, yes, that seems to be the main thing that sticks in Ann’s craw about soccer. I’m not the swiftest brunette on the block (blondes have it over me 10 to 1), but I do have a heightened sense of what I’d call “immigrat-uition.” That means I can generally sense what someone really means when they say things like “no American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer.” There are a lot of people, me included, who had two great-grandfathers born in Europe and couldn’t give a flying FIFA about “futbol.” We feel the same way about blondes who didn’t come by their goldilocks legitimately (as in great-grandma Helga wasn’t swimming in the fjords) but who presume to know all about what makes this country a great, shining city on a hill that is, preferably, reinforced by an electrical fence and attack dogs.

Contrary to what you might think, given the fact that I’m one of those dreaded immigration lawyers with ill-fitting suits and an answering machine message in four languages, I do not believe in open borders. I have a great deal of respect for Department of Homeland Security employees who are faced with a monumentally difficult job, one made even more difficult by the intransigence of a do-nothing Congress and a president whose attempts at doing “something” are a piecemeal mess.

And if I haven’t said so before, let me say it now: I absolutely hate La Raza and its rabble-rousers who block traffic and scream at the top of their lungs for something that won’t ever happen, namely, a fairy godmother who will wave a wand and grant amnesty to all the good people in the chicken processing plants.

They are, in their own self-defeating way, as bad as the smarmy Ann Coulters of the world who think that by equating “good” with “domestic” and “bad” with “foreign” she’s saying something profound. Coulter’s premise that soccer is probably not going to catch on in this country in a big way is true. That’s because in most of the countries where it’s popular, it is the only game in town. Look at Brazil. Their World Cup team went down to ignominious defeat at the hands of the Germans, and it’s as if their president was assassinated.

Here we have the greatest game in the world, American football, as well as baseball, basketball, hockey and the decreasingly legitimate sports of skeet shooting, bowling, rhythmic gymnastics, chess and golf. We are all about choice and have too much of it. Soccer will have its adherents, and maybe with the browning of society it will increase in popularity with a bump every four years, but I don’t expect much.

That said, I don’t think soccer is leading to our moral decline. I can’t say the same for pundits who inject racism into a discussion about a game that, on its best day, would make Vince Lombardi scratch his head.

Christine Flowers is a lawyer and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News.