Sports Illustrated: NU head football coach Bo Pelini insists no NU players have complained about antigay assistant Ron Brown's locker room proselytizing

Bo Pelini, notoriously combative NU Football head coach,
in a photo illustration by Derek Vogt

In an AP story published today by Sports Illustrated on SI.com, NU head football coach Bo Pelini admits the notoriety his antigay assistant coach Ron Brown has received for his extracurricular activities has worn on him, adding:

"Why don't you ask me why I hired him?" Pelini said. "I hired him because he's a good football coach. He's trustworthy. He has a lot of integrity. I hired him because I believe in him as a football coach and a guy who has positive impact on kids."

     Pelini said he knows Brown injects religion into his relationships with his players and none has complained.

     The story is a mostly sympathetic confection portraying Idealist Brown beset by detractors who call him a homophobe and a hater but who "turns the other cheek." The dark spectre of impending professional martyrdom is thrown into the account:

"To be fired for my faith would be a greater honor than to be fired because we didn't win enough games," Brown said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I haven't lost any sleep over it. I realize at some point, we live in a politically correct enough culture where that very well could happen."

     He said the risk of losing his job pales in comparison to the price others have paid for standing up for their beliefs. Christians throughout the world, he pointed out, have been murdered because of their faith.

Do these rants make my ass look fat? NU
running backs coach Ron Brown gives the
Omaha City Council a Sunday School lesson
in Old Testament cafeteria bigotry.

     Brown, who heads a Christian ministry called FreedMen Nebraska, hosts a show on a statewide Christian radio network, appears on a cable-access channel in Lincoln and writes a column for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes' magazine, has been the target of threatened legal action by the American Civil Liberties Union against Nebraska public schools that require students to attend his religiousity-soaked appearances.
     Brown said gays and lesbians do not deserve the same protections against arbitrary employment or public accommodations discriminations as blacks and women but insists on not being portrayed as attacking homosexuals, seeing himself as the instrument of a "simple, gentle, compassionate expression of the truth of God's word" and not as a "bigot or a homophobic or narrow-minded."
     Brown's most prominent local critic, Barbara Baier, a member of the Lincoln Board of Education, was adamant in her condemnation of Brown:

"He says terrible things about members of my community - citizens of this country, people who have not committed any crimes," Baier said. "He compares gays and lesbians to people who have committed crimes, people who are desiring to go and cause the destruction of the American family, and nothing could be further from the truth."