Amar'e Stoudemire's Response To Potentially Having A Gay Teammate Was As Time Sensitive As His NBA Career

TheBigLead-  Amar'e Stoudemire is currently playing basketball for Hapoel Jerusalem in the Israeli Premier League, having ended his NBA career after last season. The former six-time All-Star, was asked by an Israeli news outlet what he would think about having an openly-gay teammate and gave an incredibly disappointing response.

While most of his teammates essentially said they would have no problem with it, Stoudemire was caught saying the following:

“I’m going to shower across the street, make sure my change of clothes are around the corner, and I’m going to drive…take a different route to the gym.”

When asked if he was joking, Stoudemire said, “I mean, there’s always truth within a joke.”

-----

Boy, news really travels slow overseas, huh? I don't mean this as an indictment of Israel, but what year is their sociopolitical climate stuck in if Amar'e Stoudemire thinks it's still okay to openly talk about every nude homosexual like they are a predator that's on the hunt for his anal virginity? Saying that you would be one step from taking a restraining order out against a teammate due solely to his sexual preference would have been a frowned upon opinion when STAT was maintaining Madison Square Garden's status quo as a cesspool of overpayment and underperformance. For that reason, I simply have to imagine that deciding to casually become the voice of homophobia in the IPL has something to do with his current surroundings. I guess making your prejudices public under the "guise" of a punchline-less "joke" is just something that happens when you become a larger than life figure in a league/city that's too scared to tell you that you're a fucking idiot. 

Seriously though, is Amar'e Stoudemire on a career path that dead-ends with him becoming a poor, Israeli man's Donald Sterling? He gets partial ownership of a team, let's that power go to his head, and all the sudden he feels unconstrained by the shackles of obvious political correctness? Clearly being legitimately frightened by the potential presence of gay people is a feeling he's had for quite some time and it's only coming out now because he's in a psuedo-executive position that allows him to avoid becoming completely ostracized by his peers. I don't know what the Torah says about bunking up with boys, but I'm not letting him blame this answer on his newfound religious "enlightenment".  In my eyes, Amar'e Stoudemire is guilty of the most cowardly kind of intolerance - the type that only becomes known when the person responsible knows they won't really have to answer to it.

P.S. On a lighter note, if you need a laugh than focus only on his teammate's face throughout his response.