If you follow sports this week – in particular the NBA – you may have heard in passing that Jason Collins came out.

In the current cultural environment, Collins’s admission is big but not Earth-shattering.  There haven’t been any active openly gay athletes before – and there might not be now, since Collins is a free agent – but most people probably assumed the operative word there was “openly.”  (To hear the enlightened, cosmopolitan Bostonians tell it, the Yankees have fielded a team of 25 fornicating homosexuals each year since 1946.  So brave.)

Now begins the overreaction.

From the right, Peter Roff imagines a double standard, opining that Tim Tebow was punished because of his overt Christian faith, while Collins’s sexual preference is lauded by the media.

Said Roff: “When he arrived at the Meadowlands he was treated more like a circus freak than the guy who helped Denver make the playoffs the previous year and might just be the thing to get the Jets offense in line.”

It’s true, and it’s because Tebow is a circus freak.  Denver’s push to the second round of the 2011 playoffs had as much to do with luck as anything else.  At this point in his career, Tebow can’t throw the ball with enough strength and accuracy to be a viable NFL quarterback, which is why he spent all his time on the bench last year.

(Heck, Ray Lewis talks about God all the time, and the media overlooks a lot of negatives about him.  Two in particular come to mind.)

On the other side – and even worse – is MoveOn.org, which is apparently still around.  The erstwhile leading organization of the American left is demanding a suspension of ESPN’s Chris Broussard over his reaction to Collins’s announcement.  (Well, at least they are demanding it as much as one can demand anything with an online petition.)

MoveOn either didn’t listen to or didn’t care what Broussard actually said.  The short version: Broussard doesn’t condone sex outside of traditional marriage, doesn’t live his life that way, but doesn’t judge others who do.  It’s a calm, reasoned explanation that could be a good start to civil discourse.

Or, it could be a flash point for some bottom feeding organization to glom onto a much-discussed topic, bump up their search results, raise some money, and be marginally relevant.