You are Such a...Mennonite?!

 

Bad news abounds in every day but I had a good chuckle yesterday over the suspension of a junior hockey player. According to the London Free Press:

London Knights overage forward Landon Sim was suspended five games by the Ontario Hockey League on Monday for referring to an opposing player as a Mennonite. The 20-year-old was ejected and assessed a game misconduct at the end of the first period of London’s 5-1 win at Sault Ste. Marie on Nov. 6. The OHL found Sim contravened the league’s code of conduct “intended to provoke an opposing player that was marginalizing on both religious and cultural grounds.”

This is too good to be true, yet it is! If this wasn't humorous enough, the reaction of the Mennonite community makes it even more fun:

“It’s classic – Mennonites get in the news for something odd and suddenly, everyone pays attention,” said Troy Osborne, a Mennonite historian and the dean of Conrad Grebel University College, a school affiliated with both the University of Waterloo and the Mennonite Church. “You wonder what the heck is going on because we’re pretty well known in (Southwestern Ontario) and you see (Mennonites) in the farmers’ market in St. Jacobs and places like that. We’ve been talking about that (OHL penalty) story and I don’t want to speak for the player involved, but it seems like Mennonites are more puzzled than offended by it.”

Osborne noted that there are Mennonite hockey teams and games can get fairly intense even though the background of the Anabaptists is oriented toward non-violence and peace-making. They are probably too busy having barn-building bees and making furniture. Of course there are different "flavours" of Mennonites, from the Old Order, horse and buggy crowd, to those who don't appear much different from everyone else except those attending Taylor Swift concerts. 

I'm going out on a limb to suggest that Landon Sim didn't really know what he was saying, and now he's sitting out five games for the alleged slur. It's hard to imagine what this punishment will teach him and he'll be living this one down for a while. Calling someone a Mennonite seems so...Amish.