04 December 2007

Pork Chop Is Offensive?

I'm just checking the news over lunch, and what do I find? Baseball Mascot Gets New Name After 'PorkChop' Is Deemed Offensive. I was surprised to find out, though, that the mascot is for the Phillies' new triple-A team, and that it's Latinos who are offended.
The Lehigh Valley IronPigs, whose mascot is a large, furry pig, had selected PorkChop from more than 7,300 fan submissions. The team, which begins play in 2008, announced Monday that the mascot will be named "Ferrous" instead. [...]

Guillermo Lopez, vice president of the Latino Leadership Alliance, said he was called "pork chop" when he worked at Bethlehem Steel decades ago.

"If my parents were alive, they'd be having fits," said Lopez, among those who complained to the team. "It meant much more to them than it does to Puerto Ricans now in the Lehigh Valley."
It was decades ago that Lopez was called pork chop, he says that his parents would be upset if they weren't dead, and Lopez even admits that, when used as a term of derision, the term meant much more to his parents generation than it does to Latinos currently residing in Lehigh Valley. What an absolute crock of bull hooey.

What was it that made the Latinos think that the team was trying to resurrect a decades old term of derision that now simply refers to a tasty pork product? The mascot is a giant pig! PorkChop makes much more sense for the name of their mascot than, say, ChickenWing or BeefRoast.

PorkChop will now be named Ferrous, because thin-skinned individuals have found a way to turn an innocuous name of a minor league mascot into a racially charged issue. It's too bad that the Latino Leadership Alliance doesn't have something more important to do other than perpetuating a state of victim-hood for those they claim to represent.

It may not be politically correct, but I have a new food-related name for Guillermo and the rest of the Latinos who complained about PorkChop: Nuts.

USMC 9971 OUT

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