State law requires you to pay $50 if you scream "Yankees suck!" at a sporting event

The oddest thing in the previously secret Olympics bid chapters was not the huge deficit or the denigration of opponents, but the reference to a state law that prohibits swearing at athletes and coaches and sporting events.

Because, yes, of course, Massachusetts has a law against that: MGL Chap. 272 Sect. 36A, which states, in its entirety:

Whoever, having arrived at the age of sixteen years, directs any profane, obscene or impure language or slanderous statement at a participant or an official in a sporting event, shall be punished by a fine of not more than fifty dollars.

Chap. 272 is, of course, the collection of laws related to "crimes against chastity, morality, decency and good order," which include laws against such things as child pornography, animal cruelty and upskirt photography, but also laws you'd be amazed are still on the books in the Commonwealth, especially since some have been overturned by court decisions.

These include a law banning the sale of all contraceptives, except to married people, and only then with a doctor's prescription (which was overturned in Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972); a ban on blasphemy - including "contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures" (one year in prison); a prohibition specifically on making loud noises in a library; and a law that defines what it means to be a tramp.

As to why Boston 2024 even brought up the no-Yankees-sucks-chanting law, it was in a section of its bid proposal that dealt with specific Massachusetts laws related to sporting events.