by Christopher Paslay
From 2010 through 2018, U.S. Soccer paid women players $34.1 million in salaries and game bonuses and paid men only $26.4 million — not counting the significant additional value of various benefits that women’s players received but men did not.
Megan Rapinoe, star of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team that just won their fourth World Cup, didn’t participate in the singing of the National Anthem, and excluded herself from accepting President Trump’s invitation to visit the White House (I’m not going to the f–ing White House, were her exact words). The reason? Rapinoe was upset by the pay inequity of U.S. Soccer.
According to the National Review:
In the aftermath of an impressive World Cup win for the U.S. Women’s Soccer team, the players and their fans grew increasingly lurid in demanding “equal pay” with the men’s team — echoing the grievances aired in the team’s lawsuit against U.S Soccer for alleged sex discrimination. The gambit reached its height on Sunday, when Senator Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) tweeted out the following announcement: “I’ve introduced a #bipartisan plan to ensure equal pay for Americans who represent our country in global athletic competitions, like the World Cup or the Olympics. Currently, men & women can be paid differently for representing #TeamUSA in the same sport.”
Curiously, men and women are paid differently, but it’s not what folks like Rapinoe and Cantwell may have expected. Recently, U.S. Soccer released a document detailing ten years of financials, which stated, “From 2010 through 2018, U.S. Soccer paid our women $34.1 million in salaries and game bonuses and we paid our men $26.4 million — not counting the significant additional value of various benefits that our women’s players receive but which our men do not.”
The document also debunked Rapinoe’s hypothetical “20-friendly” season in which they would only earn 38 cents for every dollar earned by the Men’s Team in that same time frame:
The widely-reported claim that our women players currently earn only 38 cents for every dollar earned by our men is false. This claim is based on out-of-date numbers that do not reflect what our women’s players actually earn today. In particular, it overlooks the guaranteed salaries described above. The claim is also based on a hypothetical scenario — our men and women each playing 20 friendly matches in a year, which has never happened, and receiving the average bonus amount per game. That said, if the men and women ever did play in and win 20 friendlies in a year and were paid the average bonus amount, a women’s player would earn more from U.S. Soccer than the men’s player — the women’s player would earn at least $307,500 (WNT and NWSL salaries, plus game bonuses) and the men’s player would earn $263,333 (game bonuses only).
As noted in the National Review:
The U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, in other words, asked for something it didn’t actually want — “equal pay” — and demanded attention be brought to an issue that did not, by any conceivable metric, exist.
But the lack of such inequities matters little to Rapinoe, who lives in an alternate universe where she projects her own intolerance onto others and manufactures acts of oppression out of whole cloth. Instead of being grateful for her incredible fortune and opportunity, Rapinoe instead chooses to spread misinformation in an effort to convince herself she is fighting against injustice, even if that injustice needs to be created by her.
Like Rapinoe’s ridiculous notion that President Trump is a homophobe and is excluding people that look her. In May, Trump became the first Republican president ever to recognize LGBTQ Pride Month, Tweeting:
“As we celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation, let us also stand in solidarity with the many LGBT people who live in dozens of countries worldwide that punish, imprison, or even execute individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation.”
In February of 2019, Trump even launched a global effort to end criminalization of homosexuality. According to NBC News:
The Trump administration is launching a global campaign to end the criminalization of homosexuality in dozens of nations where it’s still illegal to be gay, U.S. officials tell NBC News, a bid aimed in part at denouncing Iran over its human rights record.
U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest-profile openly gay person in the Trump administration, is leading the effort, which kicks off Tuesday evening in Berlin. The U.S. embassy is flying in LGBT activists from across Europe for a strategy dinner to plan to push for decriminalization in places that still outlaw homosexuality — mostly concentrated in the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean.
Trump also fought to protect the integrity of the U.S. women’s World Cup team by refusing to support H.R. 5, a bill that gave biological males who identify as females the right to compete in women’s sports, and gave males who identify as females the right to women’s spaces, which, according to Rep. Mike Johnson, “eliminates sex-based protections for women by forcing rape crisis centers, lady’s locker rooms, female prisons, women’s sports leagues and other sex-based organizations to admit biological males.”
Now that U.S. Soccer has conclusively demonstrated that the U.S. Women’s Team makes nearly 30 percent MORE than the U.S. Men’s Team, are Rapinoe and her teammates ready to take a giant pay cut to make things equal again? Not likely.
Still, a sincere apology to America and U.S. Soccer would be nice.
Philly Teachers For Trump 