Rangers have been celebrating the launch of the club’s new Everyone, Anyone inclusion campaign as the Gers take progressive steps to modernise the football club.
The entire campaign is about reiterating that Glasgow Rangers are a football club open to Everyone, Anyone. It’s about recognising that there are bluenoses from all walks of life.
It’s also about understanding that the central bond between fans is the football club itself. Yet, despite this fantastic work, there are still some who are desperate to bemoan the club.
Without naming names – the thought of giving such “journalists” or “commentators “oxygen is enough to make me wince – the news has been met with a really insidious, backwards interpretation from some quarters.
For some people, the issue is and will always remain with Rangers. Regardless of what the club might do or what initiatives they introduce.
It’s this notion that somehow Rangers, by their very being, incite sectarianism.
This notion that there is something wrong with the club’s British identity, its traditions or its stereotyped wide-eyed maniacal supporters.
Let’s not play this down. This is absolute bigotry of the most hypocritical degree and something that both the club and supporters should take a stand against.
For these bigots, Rangers and their fans will always be one of the problems with Scottish society.
There is literally nothing the club can do to shake it.
It’s just made somewhat worse when they appear in positions of power and influence.
Whilst it is Rangers who are so constructively trying to move forward as a football club, rivals, bigots and hypocrites appear desperate to keep the club in the past, so as to keep beating it.
It’s a weird sort of justification for the destructive lust and obsession they feel for Rangers.
The notion that Rangers is a force for good in Scotland and beyond and that for supporters it is more about the love of the football club than it is religion, politics or any other such nonsense is incredibly difficult for some people to fathom.
But for Rangers fans, everyone of us, anyone of us, it’s the very thing brings bluenoses from across the world together.
Well done Rangers on this superb inclusion initiative which highlights just that.
