Martina Navratilova, Thrown Off The Court

This goes back more than 30 years. I was sitting in the American Airlines terminal at LAX, waiting for a flight, when I noticed that the woman sitting in the chair next to me is cradling a tennis racket.

And then I noticed that the woman cradling the tennis racket is Martina Navratilova.

Kids, Navratilova is not only one of the greatest tennis players of all time, she was also one of the first gay athletes to be open, and vocal, about her orientation. I would describe her as universally admired. There are few people then or now who thought of her as anything less than a high character, high caliber person.

For much of society, she may have been the first gay woman sports figure or celebrity we knew.

She opened a lot of doors.

Which is why it was all the more disheartening to read a news story late last week that a gay rights organization had unceremoniously dumped her as a spokesperson or ambassador because her political/social views were not in keeping with that of the group.

The issue had to do with whether men who identified as women and could compete as women. This is not theoretical; a high school freshman declaring himself to be a woman competed in a girls’ high school wrestling competition and won a championship.

Apparently Navratilova challenged the legitimacy of such choices, saying that it was unfair to the other women in a sporting event if someone with biologically male characteristics could enter and compete.

Or something like that.

Well, that viewpoint makes Navratilova out of touch with the times, according to the group, and off with her head.

Navratilova is not the first example of a feminist icon vilified and trashed by younger members of the movement.

In recent years, Margaret Atwood, author of the feminist classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was perceived to be too wobbly on the issues of the day and came in for Soviet-style attacks online from younger people who did not ponder the courage it took for her to write that novel 30 years ago.

Germaine Greer, one of the leading feminist theorists and authors back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, came in for the same fate, reviled by younger people who had the “courage of the keyboard” — they can trash anyone they want from the safety of their laptops, sitting in a Starbucks.

Even Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive who has inspired millions of women to find their places in the workforce, has come in for her share of online abuse.

Not too long ago, Jenna Crispin, a young feminist author whom I have interviewed, wrote a piece saying that now is the time for everyone to attack Sandberg because her views are no longer acceptable, for reasons that seem very clear to Crispin and less so to me.

And now Martina Navratilova, a woman whose courage and openness created the foundation for the modern feminist world, has been kicked to the curb by people who don’t believe she has the right to her own opinions.

When you think back to Stalinist times, the prevailing attitude was that if someone veered from whatever the party line had become, his name was erased from the history books and he was typically taken behind a prison and shot to death.

I guess the only good news in all this is that the politically correct thought police are not out for blood.

But how sad it is to see people whose freedoms came as the result of the Navratilovas, the Atwoods, the Greers, and the Sandbergs, turning on those pathfinders, rejecting them, and calling for others to reject them, because their ideas do not mesh with the fashionable ideas of the moment.

Obviously, I’m not a fan of character assassination, especially by those who, by the grace of social media, never have to look in the eye the people whose lives they are reducing to zero.

Worse, these critics are ungrateful, and ingratitude may just be a greater character flaw than character assassination.

Of course, what goes around comes around. Don’t those who realize that by beheading the individuals they should be honoring, they’re only setting themselves up to be similarly rejected and humiliated some years hence?

Of course they don’t. Ah, to be young.