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Gordon Monson: Those basketball fans weren’t the first to chant that anti-LDS phrase. Please let them be the last.

During a game against the BYU men’s basketball team, fans at Providence College unleashed an offensive chant.

“F--- the Mormons”?

Really? Again? All of them? Every last one of ‘em?

Good lord, what the hell’s wrong with some people these days?

Just like previous chants at football games at USC and at Oregon and at other places in other sports, this time that profane incantation broke out at Providence College, a Catholic school, in the first and second halves at a basketball game between the Friars and BYU this week.

Yeah. The chant was aimed, by students and a number of others in the stands, at the Cougars on the court on Tuesday night at Amica Mutual Pavilion, not by heathens seated and screaming at the Christians as they were fed to the Lions in ancient Rome on the floor of the Colosseum.

The phrase wasn’t hurled at just BYU. It was thrown at all “Mormons.”

Including Marc Buchanan, a BYU alum and fan who traveled from his home in New York with his 10-year-old daughter to watch the game.

“I have been to several away games, cheering for my Cougars,” he said, “and have become used to certain chants mocking my faith. I thought a game at a faith-based institution, such as Providence College, would be a good environment to introduce my daughter to high-level college sports. I could not have been more wrong.”

Buchanan emphasized that he’s not overly sensitive to opinions or comments regarding his faith — “I’m not a prude,” he said — but he added that having that particular profanity fired off by so many people at his religion “made it a hard night” for him and his daughter.

He wrote an email to Providence president Father Kenneth Sicard, and the Reverend responded quickly, writing him back. More on that in a minute.

A couple of things first.

Sporting events are like money — they can amplify the worst in people. I’ve heard otherwise respectable individuals shout things at games they would never say outwardly anywhere else. I heard a dainty little grandma surrounded by a couple of her grandkids once practically sheer the paint off the walls of the Delta Center because she, rather apparently, didn’t like LeBron James. She used language that would have made Jerry Sloan blush. Beyond that, in some cases, the sports environment can strip away pretenses and an outer shell of decency to reveal what people really think, or what they think they think.

Generally, observing college students gathered at a game, roiled up in rooting emotion and commotion, is not the place to find sentiments that define and reflect what society’s great thinkers are actually cogitating.

But it does divulge what some people think. Prejudices and antipathy that they hold. A chorus like “F--- the Mormons” doesn’t emanate out of nowhere. It’s meant to single out and demean those other “weird” guys and gals, to hit them where it hurts — at their core beliefs — not just to defeat them in a basketball game, but to denigrate them.

You’d have thought the large lead the Friars held pretty much throughout the contest on a cold-shooting night for BYU and the final score of 83-64 in Providence’s favor would have satisfied the chanters and done damage enough to the Cougars, would have assaulted the visitors enough without the added religious insult.

But it didn’t.

Why?

Beats me. Ring up Dr. Freud on that one.

Do people of other faiths or no faith at all loathe the Latter-day Saints enough to drop F-bombs on them in such a trivial way?

I don’t think I’ve ever heard at a football or basketball game any large group of fans yell, “F—- the Catholics” or “F—- the Baptists” or “F—- the Methodists” or “F—- the Jews.”

Everybody knows The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints owns and operates BYU, that the church is represented by BYU’s sports teams, even though there are more than a few athletes of other faiths who compete for the Cougars.

Everybody also knows the church is a conservative one, a faith that takes positions that are sometimes controversial, positions that are at times questionable to even faithful Latter-day Saints, present company included. The church does proclaim itself to be God’s one true church, Jesus’ church, and that kind of claim can be off-putting to some, seen as arrogant and exclusionary.

But for those who hold dissenting views or just want to embarrass a religion they know little about or intimidate a team repping it they want to defeat, a church at the head of a university that sponsors sports teams filled out with young college students in uniform, to do so with the F-chant flies past juvenile, straight to ugly and bigoted.

Unfortunately, religions of many kinds and the people in them have faced prejudice and persecution far worse than profane chants yelled at a dumb basketball game. But such expressions could plant seeds that are better off not planted.

Rev. Sicard knows this. Other apologetic fans at the game did and do, as well.

His response sent to Buchanan read in part as follows:

“… I have received several letters like yours. I am so disappointed by the disrespectful, offensive, inexcusable behavior of our students. Such behavior is unacceptable and is completely inconsistent with the values we try to instill in them. We will be addressing this on campus. Please accept my sincere apologies. Respectfully, Fr. Kenneth Sicard.”

As you might expect, the good Reverend gets it. He’s fully aware students, even his own — and other people, too — can soar out of bounds, out of their minds sometimes.

Best for society — even the slices that are fans at basketball and football games — if everyone in it stays in bounds, and in whatever scattered parts of their minds that are right.