A lackluster bunch

More on Russian Olympics:

Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch has an Op-Ed in the New York Times. There is a very important election coming up -- that of a new president of the International Olympic Committee. Worden goes on to say the current president, Jacques Rogge has demonstrated a huge contradiction between the IOCs "Fundamental Principles of Oylmpism" which includes a rejection of "any form of discrimination" and Rogge's oversight of two Games with huge human rights violations (Beijing and Sochi).

Alas, the 98 voting members of the IOC are a lackluster bunch. Only one so far has spoken against Russia's anti-gay laws. So is there any hope? Worden says yes. Convince the big corporate sponsors -- NBC, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Visa, etc. -- that they don't want to be associated with officially anti-gay Olympics.

A commenter found the list of IOC voting members is in Wikipedia. Some of them are former Olympians, such as Jean-Claude Killy who won skiing medals for France in the 1960s. Some of the others are from old royal families, from Denmark, Britain (Princess Anne who was at least an Olympic equestrian), Jordan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates.

That makes me think there might be a Power issue here. Royalty has a strong tendency to ignore the rights of the lowest. All the rest may value the importance of being on the IOC over advocating for the rights of the lowest. As for the corporations, it depends whether their pursuit of money blinds them to other concerns. So far, their record isn't promising.

Because of that record there was a protest today at the McDonalds headquarters to call on the company to take a stand against Russia's anti-gay law. I haven't heard how it went.

That same link has a comment from someone in British Columbia who reports that in (high) schools that have had a Gay-Straight Alliance for more than 3 years binge drinking is down. Hmm.