Megan Rapinoe, co-captain for the United States Women’s national soccer team, says that she will “probably never sing the national anthem again.”
The openly gay soccer star told Yahoo Sports that she will no longer participate in patriotic displays as a protest of the Trump administration. Rapinoe added that because she is “as talented as I am” she can use her platform as an “f-you” to those she opposes.
“I’ll probably never put my hand over my heart. I’ll probably never sing the national anthem again,” Rapinoe said adding she views herself as “a walking protest when it comes to the Trump administration,” because of “everything I stand for.
“I feel like it’s kind of defiance in and of itself to just be who I am and wear the jersey, and represent it,” Rapinoe said. “Because I’m as talented as I am, I get to be here, you don’t get to tell me if I can be here or not. So it’s kind of a good ‘F you’ to any sort of inequality or bad sentiments that the [Trump] administration might have towards people who don’t look exactly like him. Which, God help us if we all looked like him. Scary. Really scary. Ahh, disturbing.”
This is not the first time Rapinoe has protested. She was also fond of taking a knee during the national anthem after former NFL player Colin Kaepernick began his protests.
The soccer player’s protest spurred the U.S. Soccer Federation to change its rules in 2017 and require players to stand for the national anthem, a rule that Rapinoe agreed to observe.
But, as Daily Wire notes, Rapinoe slammed the rule as “cowardly.”
“I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties,” she told Sports Illustrated at the time.
“Using this blanketed patriotism as a defense against what the protest actually is was pretty cowardly,” Rapinoe said in 2017. “I think the NFL does it. I felt like the statement from U.S. Soccer, and then the rule they made without ever talking to me, that was the same as what the NFL was doing – just to not have the conversation, to try to just stop me from doing what I’m doing instead of at least having a conversation, and trying to figure out a [solution] that makes sense for everyone.”
Rapinoe told Yahoo Sports that it is not likely that she would stop her protest.
“It would take a lot” to end her protest, Rapinoe said. “It would take criminal justice reform. It would take the huge inequality gap that we have to be much better. It would take a lot of progress in LGBTQ rights. We just have such a disparity in this country in so many different ways, inequality in so many different ways.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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