… classrooms, Texas motivational speaker Eric Hogue steps up to ban not books but women. In his capacity as mayor of a small city, Hogue has decreed that women may not lead prayers at city council meetings onaccounta the Bible done said they caint.

Now ah don’t know much bout Christian invocations afore civic meetings, ahm a big ol’ blue stater, and round these parts the idea of praying together afore a town council meeting is pretty fucking weird, and, you know, making sure the prayer always happens to be Christian is even fucking weirder. But you caint quarrel with Mayor Hogue’s Bibleology – the Good Book do indeed go on bout how stupid and pointless women are, and how they better shut up ifn they know what’s good for them.

And I for one am ready to bow down to the superiority of men like Mr. Hogue to the female race. Just look at the guy and ask yourself if you could ever (I mean, ifn you’re a woman ask yourself) hope to accomplish all that he has accomplished. Start with his picture. (Scroll down.) The man is a Clown for Christ, bringing the Good News About Women, in a chock-full of chuckles format, to young people all over America. He has even self-published a clown book – Clinky The Clown (not to be confused with the very similar-sounding, very famous, Blinky The Clown) – which you can purchase. And he’s a magician!

What woman could hope to compete, invocation-wise, with a clown-magician who takes every single word in the Bible literally? Mayor Hogue, the stage is yours.

Get to know the inside of Waco Texas, the reason its rapists and illegal-weapon-brandishing killers get off scot-free, where everyone’s a Baylor University graduate.

Baylor – whose mix of ostentatious Christianity and de Sadeian degeneracy gives the Catholic priesthood a run for its money – generates the judges and DAs who ensure that good ol’ boys don’t get convicted of their crimes, while … uh … others…

Branch Davidians, Breastaurants, Bikers, and a bevy of weapons you will not believe: What better place for your college education?

You have to understand Waco, Texas. You have to understand Baylor University. You have to understand fraternities. You have to understand football.

Once you begin to understand the culture of Waco, you’ll have no trouble understanding the likely legal outcome of the university’s 1,534th rape this week.

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Begin by understanding context. To start with, this latest campus rape was just a rape: it wasn’t a gang rape, and it wasn’t filmed. At Baylor, this barely rises to the level of an event, let alone a crime.

As for a jury made up of average Waconians: Waco’s famous for breastaurants that host rival biker gangs that slaughter each other in hours-long shootouts right down the street from Baylor.

It’s just that kind of down-home all-American place okay? and no way the good citizens of Waco are going to convict a Baylor frat president of rape. I mean, that’s not what Waconians would call a violent crime. And remember: Baylor’s a Christian school! This boy’s a Christian.

UD could care less about sports of any kind (exception: competitive Scrabble), but she’ll say this: Her need to read about athletics for this blog at least led her to Deadspin. Who knew some of the best writing in America would come out of this funny, subversive, knowledgeable, source? Deadspin has taught UD much of what she’s learned about the lingo and lunacy of the jock shop, and along the way it has delighted her not only with its literacy, but also its amused embrace of the ultra-loucheness of this thing that has taken over – of all places – our universities.

Nobody notices or cares when professional soccer, football, and basketball are disgusting. We only pay attention at the very grossest margins, as when an NFL player tortures his dog to death. Moral monstrosity on the level of mere money registers not at all, as in the failure of the FIFA story, or the related story about the apparently universal tax evasion of international soccer players, to get anywhere at all. Who cares. Put a bunch of guys together with a lot of money and surprise.

But the university. Ah the university. Little streamers of seriousness continue to flutter ‘pon it. Wilted garlands of gravitas shake aloft their dying buds. The Sacred Groves of Academe! When a university reveals its true rot, as in the moral desert of (in effect) all-male Baylor, the extremity of response – A new woman president! Who, asked why she took the job, says “I love Jesus.” – tells you all you need to know about the effort required to keep stray wisps of legitimacy flying.

But I don’t want to overstate the matter…

So people do indeed tend to notice the truly debauched campus. Whorehouse-for-teens-and-their-parents proprietor University of Louisville is the higher ed scuzz-meme of the moment, cited in a kind of shorthand in many articles about other athletic scandals; indeed, it’s mentioned in a wonderful Deadspin piece about Hugh Freeze, a guy who has a lot in common with the miscreants at Baylor, being both a superduper Christian and a (reportedly) twisted piece of shit.

Ole Miss, ex-haunt of football coach Freeze [background here], has many advantages when it comes to ultra-louche supremacy on a university campus, the most important of which is its location in the most corrupt, most benighted, state in America. Nobody much cares what goes on down there, and this includes the people who run the state. So the tired business of boosters giving impermissible benefits to players, and similar venerable forms of corruption, continue to thrive at Ole Miss, which means the NCAA’s always sniffing around. The general air of loucheness in a steamy south that time forgot, plus William Faulkner having lived in Oxford, means that people often reach in the direction of his novels (with special attention to the Snopes family) to, er, contextualize some of the goings on, as Deadspin notes in a wonderful summarizing paragraph:

The revelation of Freeze’s possible sex-having brought its fair share of confused hilarity [to observers], but did little to outline the future of either of Ole Miss’s ongoing, convoluted [legal] cases with [former former Ole Miss coach suing Freeze for defamation Houston] Nutt and the NCAA. There were (are) still a number of questions to be answered — namely, how Nutt and [his lawyer Thomas] Mars knew exactly where to look [for dirt on Freeze]; whether anybody comparing this case to a William Faulkner novel actually read a William Faulkner novel; how long Freeze was possibly using school technology and school funds to maybe fuck; how far back into his career Freeze’s general misbehavior extends; whether Freeze was even the one doing the fucking; whether Ole Miss know about Freeze’s extracurriculars beforehand; and how Nutt’s legal team will use this information moving forward.

That one about whether Freeze was actually doing the fucking: There’s a theory that the calls on his phone to an escort service might have been on behalf of a recruit…

UD does think the Faulkner comparison works, since he wrote convoluted stories like this one, about vague imperishable grudges among unsavory people, like these people.

The phrase about how far back Freeze’s misbehavior extends: The Deadspin piece includes some way-twisted testimony about the way Freeze behaved when he coached a women’s high school basketball team.

One woman [says that] Freeze forced her to change shirts in his office, claiming her Grateful Dead shirt violated the school dress code because it “represented drugs.” At the time, [she] was in eighth grade; according to her, Freeze did not leave the room while she changed.

“Coach Freeze pulled me in his office and told me that my shirt represented drugs. … I said, ‘I’ll go change in the bathroom,’ and when I said that he said, ‘No, you’re going to change in here so I get the (Grateful Dead) shirt and you can’t have it back.’

He didn’t do anything sexual. But I stood in the corner and faced the wall when I did it and I changed out of my shirt. No privacy.”

Another student, remaining anonymous, claimed Freeze was “hyper attentive” when it came to making sure the girls’s skirts adhered to school policy. She also claimed that on one occasion, when she was late getting back to class from her lunch period, Freeze obliged her request to be paddled rather than sit in detention; instead of fetching a female administrator to complete or at least proctor the punishment, Freeze paddled her himself.

“(Freeze) did some bizarre warm-up taunt before actually making contact,” said the woman, who spoke to USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because she said she fears reprisal. “I was humiliated that he didn’t have a female in the room. I don’t know if the acts were intentionally sexual or if he was really that oblivious to the inherently sexual nature of his approach to discipline.”

Baylor University:

[A] nationally-ranked football powerhouse that can be classified as anything but Christian: a program that has developed into a nightmare of criminality engulfing the entire school community…

[We are following] the horrific news that has been spilling out of Waco, Texas regarding the overall tone and personality of the football program and the despicable actions of an inordinate [number] of their players over the years…

[Baylor features] an accepted culture of severe criminal behavior, sexual assaults and rapes …

[Baylor’s football coach] willingly and purposely recruited some terrible characters who he, his staff, the university and the local police department allowed to run amok while terrorizing a community.

… is how they seem to sing it at Baylor University, a Christian school apparently, but far more committed to football (and basketball) than to anything spiritual… I mean, if you go by the sorts of things that happen there…

For instance, it’s a very violent place, which seems to UD (she’s no expert) rather at odds with the Christian ethos. One of their basketball players a few years ago “punched Texas Tech forward Jordan Barncastle … breaking Barncastle’s nose and causing both benches to clear.” Although concussed during a recent game, Baylor’s quarterback insisted it was nothing and that despite some fogginess and a headache he’d be back out there again right away because nothing’s more important than winning at football. And

In January, 2014, Tevin Elliott, a defensive end out of Mount Pleasant, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for twice assaulting a former Baylor student in 2012. During that trial, two other women testified that Elliott assaulted them. A fourth alleged victim was not called to testify.

And now everyone’s abuzz with the latest Baylor violence: Under the same coach as Elliott’s, another football player is going to jail for sexual assault on a Baylor student. And this player had already been “kicked off the Boise State football team after punching and choking his girlfriend.” It looks very much as though the Baylor coach knew about this violent past.

But hey. If there’s one thing you’ve learned reading this blog, it’s that plenty of American universities will open their arms to woman beaters if the guys can catch a football. And the schools will do all they can to lie and cover up and victim-blame (Baylor carried out a wretchedly inept internal investigation.) until the bad stuff their football players do goes away. Or maybe it doesn’t go away.

And… uh… this seems to be the Christian way. I mean… One of America’s leading Christian universities keeps doing it.

Baylor’s president is Ken Starr. That Ken Starr. Investigator extraordinaire.

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Read this if you can stomach it. Baylor is a sister school to Florida State University, with similar cooperation by local media and law enforcement. Absolutely disgusting.

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UD thanks dmf.

This sentence could come from a contemporary American commentary on the Kaplanization of our once-great universities; or it could come from a contemporary American commentary on the NFLization of our once-great universities.

This particular sentence happens to be about the sporty arm of the pincer movement; and coming as it does from Texas, of all places, it tells you something. It tells you something about why immense new Adzillatronned university football and basketball stadiums are full of gaping holes during even the biggest games… Why a growing branch of the digital and design industries is now devoted to making an empty silence look like a crowded blow-out on network tv…

The author of this commentary is telling you why people are leaving the American university stadium, but you don’t want to listen because you know that the problems are too basic to fix.

If college football is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the A&M – LSU game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.

… It’s hard to say what should happen with college football. Paying the players would certainly be fairer, but it would finish off whatever remains of an institution that once meant far more than money. The arcane rules put in place to protect college athletics from market forces have spawned a densely complex culture of cheating, a tradition almost as old as the sport. How long can Universities, bastions of enlightened rational values, continue this charade? What toll is it taking on the wider goals of those institutions?

College football may be a necessary casualty of a freer, more prosperous world. We are all likely to cling to the remains at least a little while longer. Maybe someday (next year?), when the Longhorns’ helmets are sporting a giant BestBuy logo and the program is playing two additional highly-paid exhibition games each year against the likes of Abilene Christian and the fighting Javelinas of A&M Kingsville we’ll finally have to give it up.

Try his first paragraph this way:

If a college education is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.

Except that in the Kaplanization case, it’s not just emotional energy that’s lacking when the professor is a coached happy face on a jiggly screen full of funny little games. It’s also of course intellectual energy.

Stadium seats will go the same way as classroom seats: Eventually all university activity will jiggle on-screen. Imagine the University of Phoenix with a sports channel.