Jason Collins, 'Heroic'????

I absolutely can't believe the to-do over basketball player Jason Collins outing himself as a homosexual.

One breathless commentator over at USA Today even compared him with Jackie Robinson, believe it or not...

I'm sure you've all noticed the 'straight only' bathrooms, water fountains, seating sections in restaurants and public buildings and the many neighborhoods where gays are unable to buy property.

Oh, wait a minute, you haven't?

Full disclosure..I'm not a round ball fan and know nothing about Collins, nor do I care whom he sleeps with. But it seems to me that calling him heroic is just a tad misplaced.

If anyone deserves credit and sympathy, it's his former fiancée, Carolyn Moos.

She only found out Collins was a gay a couple of days before he announced it.


Carolyn tells TMZ, she never once suspected he was gay, so the news is shocking. She says Collins eventually revealed everything last weekend — just days before his big announcement — and said that his homosexuality was the real reason he ended things with her.

At the time of their breakup, Carolyn says Jason gave a bunch of BS reasons for calling it quits ... and she could never understand what went wrong, until now. [...]

"It's very emotional for me as a woman to have invested [eight] years in my dream to have a husband, soul mate, and best friend in him. So this is all hard to understand."

Eight years. And after all that, he calls her up just like that and says 'Guess what, I'm batting for the other team'. Like he didn't know before?

And while Jason Collins was discovering this about himself, does anyone doubt he was cheating on her?

If he had any doubts about his orientation and he cared about this young woman and her feelings, I think he owed her some honesty.

To her credit, Ms. Moos has remained fairly classy about being strung along like that.

"I care about [Jason] tremendously and only want the best for him," she said. "I want Jason to be happy for a lifetime and stay true to who he really is, inside and out."

Again, I could care less who Jason Collins sleeps with. But based what his behavior and his treatment of his fiancée reveals about his character, I don't see him being held up as any kind of hero or model at all.

That's the only part about this I think worthy of mention, because it shows how debased our ideas of what heroism is are becoming.