Rankine, Snoop and the AFL’s hypocrisy on homophobia

“It’s acceptable in the singing world (to come out as gay), but in the rap world I don’t know if it will ever be acceptable because rap is so masculine.

“It’s like a football team. You can’t be in a locker room full of motherf---ing tough-ass dudes, then all of a sudden say ‘Hey, man, I like you.’ You know, that’s going to be tough.”

Welcome to the thoughts of gangsta rapper Snoop Dogg, as told to The Guardian in a 2014 interview. Snoop is the entertainer of choice for the AFL grand final.

What else has Dogg got for us? Oh that’s it, the quickly-deleted Instagram post, also from 2014, showing two men together captioned, “go suck ya man n get off my line f. A. G.”

Cool. This is without getting into the rapper’s problematic history of using misogynistic, sexually demeaning language in his lyrics.

Someone at AFL house put all this together and said this is the man for us. He perfectly fits who we are. Besides, did no one else see him dressed up like an equestrian rider at the Paris Olympics? Oh, the laughs.

Dogg says he is reformed and has gay friends, blah blah. Good for him. That is still a world away from being the right person for the AFL’s biggest stage.

Within days of confirming the worst choice of AFL entertainment since Meat Loaf, the AFL was confronted with its own hypocrisy.

Adelaide’s Izak Rankine is being investigated for using a homophobic slur towards a Collingwood player during the game on Saturday night.

To be clear, because it isn’t clear from their choice of grand final entertainment, the AFL has no truck with homophobia and comes down hard on incidents involving homophobic insults on the field.

More to the point, some entertainers on the football field on grand final day can be daily drug users, make homophobic posts and write misogynistic lyrics celebrating violence against women, but only if they wear bling and don’t kick footballs. They can’t be the entertainers people actually most came to see.

If Rankine is found to have said what he is accused of saying he will rightly be suspended. He is out of step with AFL values. Actually, he is out of step with community expectations, we can’t now be sure about AFL values.

Rankine is the fourth player at AFL level since Gather Round last year to be accused of, or suspended for, making homophobic comments.

That fact alone is astounding and suggests the message is not getting through. Why does this keep happening? Rankine, if found guilty, can expect at least a five-match suspension and to miss every Adelaide final. Based on precedent, he’d deserve it.

You could also argue that five matches is too great a punishment, and you might be right. It sits jarringly against the three matches players get if you knock someone out and concuss them with a bump. It sits discordantly against the absence of bans for what players say about opponents’ wives, mothers or girlfriends.

But we get here because Jeremy Finlayson was banned for three weeks last year for a homophobic slur with an AFL warning then that players needn’t assume further such sledges would get the same penalty. They didn’t. Soon afterwards, Wil Powell said something similar and was banned for five matches.

The AFL said it had a zero tolerance policy for this sort of language and was determined that everyone should feel safe at work and at football grounds. Ahem, Snoop?

Then this year, Jack Graham made another similar slur and got four matches, after a one-match discount because he self-reported. Last year, AFL-listed player Lance Collard got six matches for homophobic abuse in the VFL; he was hit with an extra match for having made multiple comments. Riak Andrew got five games this year, also in the VFL.

So it would be a remarkable watering down of the penalty for the AFL to hand Rankine a lighter penalty than Graham, who self-reported.

That means he will take no part in the finals. Unless, perhaps, he wants to sing back-up for Snoop Dogg.

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