First, the obvious – The UFC has a homophobia problem. The problem is that the organization doesn’t appear to care in any meaningful way when its people routinely sling homophobic slurs around.

Yes, the leading MMA promotion pays lip service through carefully crafted statements and strategic partnerships with the right organizations from time to time. But all too often it takes no impactful action when gay-bashing hate speech is used by its fighters or officials.

Back when Donald Cowboy Cerrone called light heavyweight champion Daniel a fag at an official UFC fan Q&A in Las Vegas after UFC 200, the fighter quickly issued a social media apology and that was that. When middleweight champ and FOX broadcast analyst and show co-host Michael Bisping called UFC 199 opponent Luke Rockhold a faggot the month prior at a post-event press conference it didn’t seem to cause much of a stir in the UFC.

Bisping issued a subsequent apology almost as offensive as the slur itself, and didn’t seem to lose a beat or get any public heat from the UFC or FOX, the promotion’s current broadcast partner. To be fair, fighters like Cerrone and Bisping certainly would have had no reason to believe the UFC would significantly oppose such hate speech because, after all, longtime UFC president Dana White has been known to use homophobic and other slurs in public, at reporters, fans, and anyone else who may have shaken his fragile psyche.

Back in 2009 White and the UFC filmed and released an official video from one of their social media accounts where White insulted reporter Loretta Hunt with misogynistic insults and called others several homophobic slurs including faggot. That official video was conceived of, filmed, edited, produced, released, and distributed by the UFC, which evidently thought it was good for their brand and perfectly acceptable.

After the video made it outside of Dana White’s echo chamber, of course, it was instantly rebuked for what it was – hateful, juvenile, trash and harassment. White made a weak apology and went on to continue to serve as UFC president to this day, even cashing out as a minority-stakeholder last year when the company was sold to WME-IMG for billions of dollars.

Bisping, Cerrone, and White did and are doing just fine, professionally, after their public homophobic outbursts. So are Tony Ferguson and Fabricio Werdum.

Leading up to UFC 216 both Ferguson and Werdum shouted homophobic slurs at each other in Spanish at a media luncheon and had to be physically separated from one another lest the verbal violence turn physical. Werdum shouted the word over and over again, like a petulant child who’d just learned a phrase, and Ferguson climbed into the gutter with the heavyweight, screaming it a few times back at him.

Of course, Werdum has used that same homophobic slur in public, before. This wasn’t the first time he’d done so, publicly.

In any case, we’re a couple weeks removed from the most recent time and Ferguson is now a UFC champion and Werdum was just rewarded with another fight at UFC 217, replacing Mark Hunt who is suing the UFC after its role in allowing Brock Lesnar to compete against the kickboxer at UFC 200 despite his not having to follow normal USADA drug-testing protocols and after Lesnar failed pre-fight banned PED screenings.

Neither Ferguson nor Werdum have been met with any significant official sanction from the UFC for their public hate speech. So, you can add them to the earlier list of Cerrone, Bisping, and White, in that way.

That trip down recent memory-lane is just to reiterate with some examples what we began with – the UFC has an obvious homophobia problem.

That issue of homophobia happens to be connected to another important concern – MMA power brokers attempting to intimidate members of the media. Back in 2009 when the UFC and White released their professionally-produced video it was more than childish cussing – it was a concerted effort to put fear into media members and sources lest they ever say or write anything that White disagreed with.

White didn’t like Hunt’s sources so he called them pussies and faggots. White didn’t like Hunt’s report so he called it retarded, and her a bitch.

White and the UFC’s stick (insulting, lying about, cursing at, kicking out of events) & carrot (granting special access to him for interviews, secretly paying for coverage) approach to the media is nothing new. They’re also of course not the only ones to take that approach.

Fabricio Werdum’s manager Ali Abdelaziz does what he can along those lines quite often as well. Like White, the former fighter also combines his media intimidation tactics with homophobia and misogyny quite seamlessly.

After Werdum and Ferguson shouted the homophobic profanity at one another leading up to UFC 216 the incident was widely reported by MMA beat reporters and outlets. Obviously, the altercation and slurs were both newsworthy and should have been reported on.

The week after Werdum and Ferguson’s shouting match Ali went on MMAFighting’s The MMA Hour program and outrageously claimed that the occurrence was not worth reporting and insulted those journalists who had reported the news.

Abdelaziz called those journalists who had written about the media luncheon Clown-ass reporters.

Some of them [are] on your site. Straight up, I’m going to call them clowns…it’s clickbait.

When host Ariel Helwani pointed out that Werdum and Ferguson calling each other faggots at a media lunch was, of course, news, Abdelaziz moved to saying the media didn’t mention Ferguson’s offenses enough, and offered a nonsensical explanation how, because Brazilian and Spanish fighters he knows routinely call him Spanish homophobic slurs, the term maricon was not actually homophobic when Werdum screamed it, over and over.

After calling legitimate news clickbait, Abdelaziz then threatened independent media outlets for reporting it and promised reprisal. MMA Junkie, too. Everybody’s going to get it. When I see them, we will talk, he scowled.

Sadly, that threat was glossed over and Abdelaziz went on promoting his various interests. As we mentioned above, Abdelaziz has a history of trying to bully media, and a history of hate speech.

Just days before that MMA Hour appearance, Abdelaziz responded to an insightful tweet from MMAFighting reporter Dave Doyle criticizing Werdum’s homophobic comments and connections to Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov (who has for years aggressively persecuted LGBTQ people with a Fuck you message on Twitter which was later apparently taken down. The contrast between how Abdelaziz interacts with media members when they roll out a red carpet for him and when they are critical of him or people he does business with is stark.

In years past, Abdelaziz has called veteran reporter and editor Mike Russell a cockroach, a fucking faggot and loser in public, during interviews and fan Q&A’s.

I’ve worked with and for Russell, as have many others in the field over the course of his impressive journalism career. Russell has worked for Break Media, UFC.com, TheFightNetwork, and many other top outlets.

His offense against Abdelaziz seems to be Russell’s in-depth investigations of and reporting on, among other things, the manager’s serial lies about his background, athletic and otherwise, and the improper and possibly illegal dual roles of promoter and manager that he held for years.

On The MMA Hour, Ali said he thought homophobic slurs shouldn’t be used in public. No, they shouldn’t be used at all, even in private.

Sadly, most of us have used those and other slurs. It’s never good, though, and something hateful being commonplace doesn’t excuse specific examples of it.

Again, that all should be obvious, though it may not be to many. What I’ve been thinking a bit about, however, is how media intimidation like Abdelaziz’s angrily promising that he is going to go after outlets like MMAJunkie and MMAFighting for their simply reporting the news is going unexamined and unchallenged.

Media members and outlets should repudiate this type of attempt at intimidation from one of the most prominent power-brokers in the sport in the same way many of us tried to do when the UFC attempted to intimidate the industry by expelling Helwani and two of his fine MMAFighting colleagues – Esther Lin and Casey Leydon – from UFC 199 last year because Helwani and MMAFighting reported news.

New organizations like the new MMAJA would be particularly helpful, here. In fact, the nascent media group picked up momentum as a concept after a group of media members – myself included – began comparing notes and drafting letters criticizing the UFC 199 media purge.

Standing up to promoters intimidating media members is important, but that type of tyranny should be battled wherever it is found in the sport. Abdelaziz is a manger of some of the biggest names in MMA, and also a longtime big-time promoter. So, he’s influential.

With Abdelaziz’s consistent public attempts to intimidate media members (to say nothing of more private ones) through insults and threats it’s high time that he is interviewed and written of a bit differently. Giving someone like that a platform to spew threats without repudiation or even examination is negligent and against the media’s own collective, deep and long-term interests.

It’s also not very good content. Beyond that, the MMA I’ve known and loved as a fan since 1993, trained and competed in since 1999, and covered professionally since 2005 is not a sport or world that should be typified by bullies.

There is great courage, great compassion, kindness, silliness, humanity, heart, and skill in MMA. The bullies and bigots are certainly not in the majority in MMA.

If we don’t take away the bullies’ microphones, we can at least ask some good follow-up questions or write about them with more context, unafraid of reprisal.