The Liberal Assault on the NFL

[steff]

thanks oped!  



I thought of another reason why I'll never go conservative.   I hate war.  But not for the peace, love, hippy reasons.  I hate it for the families left behind.  You know why Paul?  because I lost my dad in Viet Nam....one problem tho, he didn't die there.  he died in 2006.  But as far as it came to me, I lost my dad in Viet Nam.  so I hate war.  I hate what it does to families.  I feel for the families more than the soldiers a lot of the time.  How many families are destroyed by war & only 1 of them ever sees combat.  yet many more than just the soldier & his enemy pay the price long term. 

 at the same time, I gladly researched info about my dad, met with vets that served with him, collected as much info about his service as I could.  Just so I could find something to pass onto my son about his grandfather.  A grandfather he never knew & a grandfather that never even knew he had a grandson.   Even tho my father survived the war, my daddy didn't. 

[Value Buy]

Sept 16, 2014 15:57:17 GMT -5 swamp said:

Sept 16, 2014 15:06:53 GMT -5 Wisconsin Beth said:

Yep.  And using a switch on a 4 year old after stuffing leaves in his mouth apparently doesn't sit well for them either.  Go A-B

What a bunch of freakin liberal pansies. 

Yes, they were disappointed in the NFL answer to the problem.

Note they did not pull their advertising.

Did not threaten to pull it.

Did not tell the NFL what is the politically correct solution to the problem  either.

Shame on this multi international corporation.

They are guilty of, if you are not part of the answer you are part of the problem syndrome.

I now have to go pour a Bud Light down the kitchen sink in protest.

[tallguy]

but in the meantime, I'll just point out that I'm right about the fact the left politicizes everything.

Good to know that you are now such a proud member of the left, because there ain't NOBODY who politicizes ANYTHING as much as you.  (You know if you could make a rational argument that could actually stand you wouldn't have to twist everything so much.)

And dude, if you've ever been right it was likely an accident.   

[OldCoyote]

Gee I had no problem understanding what Paul said.

[tallguy]

We can all understand what he said.  Doesn't mean it's not bullsh**.

[Opti]

Sept 16, 2014 11:04:59 GMT -5 AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP said:

Since we can't mention politics in the current events thread on the NFL, I'll start a thread here.

If you weren't following over there- I'll do my best to bring you up to speed- but in the meantime, I'll just point out that I'm right about the fact the left politicizes everything.  And IMHO, it's the beginning of the end of the NFL as we know it.  


The NFL now has a "Vice President for Social Responsibility", so you can pretty much stick a fork in the league- it's done.  You see, it's not about domestic violence- it's about emasculating the sport.

espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11531293/roger-goodell-nfl-create-social-responsibility-role-help-domestic-violence-social-issues

The commissioner announced that Anna Isaacson will be the league's vice president for social responsibility -- a new position -- in addition to her current role as the league's vice president of community affairs and philanthropy.

Just the kind of moonbattery the left would embrace, but...

Terry O'Neill, the president for the National Organization of Women (NOW), issued a statement that the NFL's hires are "a step in the right direction -- but it's not enough."

It never is, Roger. It never is.

There are times I really wish this wasn't a message board.

I want to scream 'grow the F^&%$# up' and WTE do you think the duties

of her current role as the league's vice president of community affairs and philanthropy.

[Opti]

are anyway.

(Damn trackpad, damn developers, and curses where is Ferrari mind mode

for Windows?)

Paul, she is in charge of people handling and making search public

perception is managed to keep revenue flowing in. They added a title

so she could actively track these situations. There won't be a Penn State,

who handles this, sweep under the rug thing.

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

Sept 17, 2014 2:41:40 GMT -5 Opti said:

Sept 16, 2014 11:04:59 GMT -5 AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP said:

Since we can't mention politics in the current events thread on the NFL, I'll start a thread here.

If you weren't following over there- I'll do my best to bring you up to speed- but in the meantime, I'll just point out that I'm right about the fact the left politicizes everything.  And IMHO, it's the beginning of the end of the NFL as we know it.  


The NFL now has a "Vice President for Social Responsibility", so you can pretty much stick a fork in the league- it's done.  You see, it's not about domestic violence- it's about emasculating the sport.

espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11531293/roger-goodell-nfl-create-social-responsibility-role-help-domestic-violence-social-issues

Just the kind of moonbattery the left would embrace, but...
It never is, Roger. It never is.

There are times I really wish this wasn't a message board.

I want to scream 'grow the F^&%$# up' and WTE do you think the duties

of her current role as the league's vice president of community affairs and philanthropy.

You're asking NOW and the rest of the loony left to grow up?  Good luck with that.  But seriously, you're not seeing the problem from my perspective.  I am very seriously alarmed- precisely because I am all growed up and living in Realville- that we live in a country where it is so easy to whip the entire population up into a frenzy and offering a nearly unanimous, scripted opinion on an internal business decision.

And yes, I'm also all growed up enough to know that this is the way it is, and the NFL should not have been blindsided by the issue as they have been.  They should have concerned themselves more with the optics given the high profile of their employees.  But the question is why?  Why does the NFL in particular have to be worried about this?  Because while the NFL is not a hotbed of wife beaters and child abusers, it is a bastion of testosterone and for lack of a better word: true manliness.  It's violent by its very nature- being a contact sport; but it's also a multi-billion-dollar cash cow.  It's a small piece of what's left of American culture.  Of normalcy.

And if you're skeptical that liberalism is an ideology at war with nature- at war with the natural law foundation America was built on which fully explains America's unique history and cultural dominance world-wide, and who seek to undermine normalcy wherever it is found because it is a threat to the Star-Wars-Bar-Scene 'multiculturalism' they envision-- then you simply need to be better informed.  The attack on the NFL is not politics?  Then, if it's not politics, then what's driving the anti-NFL hysteria?  It's certainly not the data:

On Tuesday's Mark Levin Show: Mark begins with another example from the mainstream media of painting an incorrect picture on a situation. The idea or notion that the NFL is full of criminals is wrong and Mark gives the statistics. In fact, the domestic violence incidents in the NFL are actually half of the amount that occurs in the general public. We're being led to believe that the NFL as a whole is a big troubled organization, when regular society is much worse. Once again we can't rely on the mainstream media or government propaganda to tell the truth because they spin things to fit their agenda and their attacks on capitalism and the individual. 

www.marklevinshow.com/common/page.php?pt=September+16%2C+2014&id=11004&is_corp=0

This article provides a wealth of links to data that do not support the current image of the NFL being propagated by those "outraged" who are not fans, but political activists on the left, like NOW- already cited.  And do not get confused- the source is not RedState.com , that is only the aggregator- and I only use them because the mainstream media has long since quit doing their job and you can't find this data reported anywhere else.  FiveThirtyEight is decidedly NOT a conservative bunch.  They're one of several sources cited.

www.redstate.com/2014/09/16/nfl-hotbed-wife-child-beaters/

Let me begin with two bits of information:

If I made the rules, Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson would be out of the NFL and probably both of them would be doing some time for assault and child abuse.

I really don’t care about NFL football. My sports seasons are MLB and NHL. I watch the NFL for about 2 weeks before hockey starts. Remember, I live in St. Louis, home of one of the most irrelevant NFL teams in the league. So the long-term viability of the NFL, both locally and as an institution is pretty much meaningless to me.

That said…most of us probably didn’t bat an eyelash when we heard about the Rice KO of his then-fiancee, now-wife. After all, the conventional wisdom is that the NFL is full of criminals…wife-beaters, sexual abusers, murderers, rapists, etc. And the leftists are going to remind us of this every time some sort of offensive act occurs. But is this true?

The truth of the matter is that the rate of criminality in the NFL is lower than that of the general public. No, the NFL does not have a “violence against women problem”, or at least not one that is worse than the public in general. As Jim Picht of Communities Digital News shows us, the incidence of domestic violence by NFL players is actually around half that of the same age group in the general United States population. He cites two different studies that show similar results…one done in 1999 by Alfred Blumstein & Jeff Benedict, and another published back in July by Benjamin Morris at fivethirtyeight.com. Picht writes:

Blumstein and Benedict found that of the 342 black players in their sample, 97 of them, or 28 percent, had an arrest for one of these crimes. There were 77 whites in the sample; seven of them, or 9 percent, had an arrest

Those numbers appear high until we compare them with arrest numbers for the general population. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports provided the arrest data. For the general population, the arrest rate for assault for black men was 6,990 per 100,00, and for whites, 2,209.

The corresponding rate for NFL players, black and white, was less than half the rate for the general population.

More recently, USA Today published its USA Today NFL Arrests Database, which goes from 2000, just after the Blumstein-Benedict study, to today. Benjamin Morris at FiveThirtyEight’s DataLab used these data with the Bureau of Crime Statistics’ Arrest Data Analysis Tool to compare arrest rates for NFL players and the general population.

Morris looked only at the 25-30 age group, which most closely reflects the age of NFL players. What he found was that, again, NFL players have arrest rates far below the general population. Their arrest rates for domestic violence are half the rate of the general public, just as Blumstein and Benedict found. In addition, Morris found that NFL arrest rates for DUI were about one-fourth the general rate; for non-domestic assault, about one-sixth; for sex offenses, about one-half; and for non-violent gun-related offenses, about one-half.

Overall, arrest rates in the NFL are only 13 percent those for the general public among men aged 25 to 30.

 fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-violence-arrests-among-nfl-players/

Grow up?  A dose of your own medicine might be in order.  It's great advice- study issues, be well-informed, have an opinion rooted in facts and logic.  If you do, then the things I say will not sound quite as crazy.

My opinion is correct:  We are experiencing an attack by the left on an institution they've long despised: sports, and in the NFL you find not only sports, but well-conducted capitalism.  One of the biggest and most successful businesses in America.  How could the left possibly resist attacking it?

[mmhmm]

My opinion is correct

You think your opinion is correct, AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP. That's to be expected. However, your opinion is not now, has never been, and never will be a global absolute. Some people will not agree with your opinion. Those people will find it wrong. They're just as credible as you are. As far as I know (and posting history will back me up), you are not an oracle.

[Tennesseer]

The more some become well-informed, the more some sound even crazier.

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

Sept 17, 2014 8:27:18 GMT -5 mmhmm said:

My opinion is correct

You think your opinion is correct, AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP. That's to be expected. However, your opinion is not now, has never been, and never will be a global absolute. Some people will not agree with your opinion. Those people will find it wrong. They're just as credible as you are. As far as I know (and posting history will back me up), you are not an oracle.

Some will not agree.  They are free to be wrong. 

You know what else sends libs up a tree?  Absolutes.  And confident beliefs.  Confidence in general bothers a lot of people because we've all been so steeped in one version or other of Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends And Influence People".  That, and one of the more effective assaults on nature and nature's laws is moral relativism.  This is why you so infrequently see moral clarity on issues ranging from the right to defend oneself, to Hamas v. Israel.

When you're wrong- and you can't or won't fix it lest your entire worldview come crashing down around you, a great approach is to convince everyone- including your opponents that nobody is right- nobody can be right- we're all just different.  That's why you get the new agey claptrap of "your truth".  

There's certainly room for differences of opinion on issues- not saying there isn't.  I'm saying I confidently believe my position on this to be correct, and it is being illustrated almost by the minute to be correct.

[mmhmm]

Confidence is a wonderful thing if backed up in reality by real knowledge and skills. Hubris, on the other hand, is something entirely different ...

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

Sept 16, 2014 15:58:12 GMT -5 Sum Dum Gai said:

So only stupid people are liberals, all the smart ones are conservatives.

Hmm... let's see...

Those with post graduate degrees are more likely to vote liberal, so we have these folks


Against these folks


Paul may have a point.

According to the liberals at PEW, GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.

“Republicans fare substantially better than Democrats on several questions in the survey, as is typically the case in surveys about political knowledge,” said the study, which noted that Democrats outscored Republicans on five questions by an average of 4.6 percent.

Oldie- but a goodie:  dailycaller.com/2012/04/22/science-say-gop-voters-better-informed-open-minded/#ixzz1ssc0VHdF

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

After all, how do you think I come here day after day and put up with you people? 

[Phoenix84]

Sept 16, 2014 11:16:37 GMT -5 Sum Dum Gai said:

Liberals were involved in this how? The league created this position on their own. She's not there to police anything, she's there to do damage/spin control.

Keep grasping at those straws though, you might get something one day.

That's pretty much how I view it. The position was created to make it look like they're doing something. If they didn't, then there would a public hue and cry over their "lack of response" to the issue.

I doubt the new position will really do anything. It's a PR move, companies, governments, and other organizations do it all the time.

[Virgil Showlion]

I don't see what business a professional organization has in monitoring--let alone governing--its members' private lives. Disclaim the shameful behaviour, but "It's really not our concern how football players conduct their personal lives." is good enough for me.

That said, I agree with Dark that "Vice President for Social Responsibility" sounds like the title the tobacco companies give the guy who runs around to photo ops with hard workin' tobacco farmers.

Why anybody cares about a few football players with half of the world on fire around us is another mystery for the ages.

[mmhmm]

I've removed one post. Let's avoid diagnosing personality disorders on the forum, please. None of us are qualified to do so. Thanks.

mmhmm, Politics Moderator

[mmhmm]

Sept 17, 2014 10:27:53 GMT -5 Virgil Showlion said:

I don't see what business a professional organization has in monitoring--let alone governing--its members' private lives. Disclaim the shameful behaviour, but "It's really not our concern how football players conduct their personal lives." is good enough for me.

That said, I agree with Dark that "Vice President for Social Responsibility" sounds like the title the tobacco companies give the guy who runs around to photo ops with hard workin' tobacco farmers.

Why anybody cares about a few football players with half of the world on fire around us is another mystery for the ages.

That professional organization is interested in the money it makes, Virgil. There's a whole, bloomin' lot of it! Their advertisers are up in arms over certain events and the NFL is concerned about loss of revenue. It's not about caring for the football players. It's about the golden green.

[Virgil Showlion]

Sept 17, 2014 11:06:34 GMT -5 mmhmm said:

Sept 17, 2014 10:27:53 GMT -5 Virgil Showlion said:

I don't see what business a professional organization has in monitoring--let alone governing--its members' private lives. Disclaim the shameful behaviour, but "It's really not our concern how football players conduct their personal lives." is good enough for me.

That said, I agree with Dark that "Vice President for Social Responsibility" sounds like the title the tobacco companies give the guy who runs around to photo ops with hard workin' tobacco farmers.

Why anybody cares about a few football players with half of the world on fire around us is another mystery for the ages.

That professional organization is interested in the money it makes, Virgil. There's a whole, bloomin' lot of it! Their advertisers are up in arms over certain events and the NFL is concerned about loss of revenue. It's not about caring for the football players. It's about the golden green.

What exactly is the NFL supposed to do about it?

If they want to put a morals clause in the employment contract that states "You will be docked $X.00 in pay if you punch your spouse." and the clause holds legal muster, then by all means do so. Barring that, their relationship with a player starts and ends with the employment contract. It is neither their prerogative nor their responsibility to censure athletes for misconduct in their private lives. We have a system in place for that. It's called "the justice system".

And then this issue of the NFL "releasing video": why does the NFL even have video? At what point did they morph from an organization regulating a professional sport into a de facto news/surveillance agency with a duty to inform the public?

As an organization, their response to the masses demanding "social responsibility" should be that their sole social responsibility is--or ought to be--respecting the role and contractual limits of their relationship with the athletes.

[djAdvocate]

Sept 17, 2014 9:23:51 GMT -5 AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP said:

Sept 17, 2014 8:27:18 GMT -5 mmhmm said:

You think your opinion is correct, AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP. That's to be expected. However, your opinion is not now, has never been, and never will be a global absolute. Some people will not agree with your opinion. Those people will find it wrong. They're just as credible as you are. As far as I know (and posting history will back me up), you are not an oracle.

Some will not agree.  They are free to be wrong. 

You know what else sends libs up a tree?  Absolutes. 

Kant was a liberal.  he is pretty much the reigning king of absolutes in moral philosophy.  and his positions have held up very well.

And confident beliefs.  Confidence in general bothers a lot of people because we've all been so steeped in one version or other of Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends And Influence People".  That, and one of the more effective assaults on nature and nature's laws is moral relativism.  This is why you so infrequently see moral clarity on issues ranging from the right to defend oneself, to Hamas v. Israel.

the way conservatives use the phrase "moral relativism" is the exact opposite of it's actual meaning (i have illustrated this before, but it clearly did not make an impression).  and you are right, we liberals find the callous disregard for meaning, the willful ignorance in that, and the political positioning done at the expense of intellectual honesty utterly galling.

When you're wrong- and you can't or won't fix it lest your entire worldview come crashing down around you, a great approach is to convince everyone- including your opponents that nobody is right- nobody can be right- we're all just different.  That's why you get the new agey claptrap of "your truth". 

no, we are just not as hung up on our views as you are.  and that is, in fact, a weakness, politically- one that you routinely exploit.  so, even though you are often wrong, it makes your PR a helluvalot easier than the "nuancing" we feel compelled to do.  then there is dondub.

There's certainly room for differences of opinion on issues- not saying there isn't.  I'm saying I confidently believe my position on this to be correct, and it is being illustrated almost by the minute to be correct.

what is correct about it?

[happyhoix]

Sept 17, 2014 10:27:53 GMT -5 Virgil Showlion said:

I don't see what business a professional organization has in monitoring--let alone governing--its members' private lives. Disclaim the shameful behaviour, but "It's really not our concern how football players conduct their personal lives." is good enough for me.

That said, I agree with Dark that "Vice President for Social Responsibility" sounds like the title the tobacco companies give the guy who runs around to photo ops with hard workin' tobacco farmers.

Why anybody cares about a few football players with half of the world on fire around us is another mystery for the ages.

Almost everyplace you work has some kind of morality clause that will get you fired if you break the law. 

At my current job, the police came and arrested a pediphile. Took him out in handcuffs. Seized his work computer. There we were, on TV, our company name in big letters over the doorway that the guy was walked through. Do you think we didn't fire his ass that very day?

NFL players get a lot of publicity because they're in the public eye, just like movie stars and politicians. However there are lots of regular people, everyday, who get canned for committing a criminal act. Heck for some jobs you need a security clearance or a DMV report showing you haven't had any accidents, and failing to have that gets you canned.  So sure, companies DO have the ability to dictate to some extent what you can do in your private life.

[djAdvocate]

Sept 17, 2014 9:26:58 GMT -5 AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP said:

Sept 16, 2014 15:58:12 GMT -5 Sum Dum Gai said:

Hmm... let's see...

Those with post graduate degrees are more likely to vote liberal, so we have these folks


Against these folks


Paul may have a point.

According to the liberals at PEW, GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.

really?  i would like to see those surveys.  i have seen surveys that say that conservatives are better educated than liberals.  that one makes sense to me.  but i am betting that your other claims here are false.  oh, and please let's not make this a discussion of Democrats and Republicans.  let's stick to self identifying liberals and conservatives, who are members of BOTH parties.

[djAdvocate]

Sept 17, 2014 9:28:19 GMT -5 AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP said:

After all, how do you think I come here day after day and put up with you people? 

i don't think it would be prudent or wise to get into a contest over who is more tolerant, but if you are game, so am i. 

[happyhoix]

But seriously, you're not seeing the problem from my perspective. I am very seriously alarmed- precisely because I am all growed up and living in Realville- that we live in a country where it is so easy to whip the entire population up into a frenzy and offering a nearly unanimous, scripted opinion on an internal business decision.

1) No, we don't all see things from your perspective. Some of us have our own perspectives. There are no right or wrong perspectives. There are just different perspectives.
2) The entire population is not whipped up in a frenzy. Seriously. Most of us really don't care much one way or another about this whole issue.
3) The idea that this issue has a nearly unanimous scripted opinion is laughable. I doubt there are even two posters on this board who completely agree on this issue. Then there are posters like me who don't really have much of an opinion about this and consider it simply a PR mess that the NFL is trying to crawl out of. 

I don't know why this thing is making you so crazy. It isn't the end of the NFL, or the end of America, or the end of masculinity. It's a little shit storm the NFL stepped into; they'll scrap it off their shoes and go on, nothing much will change,  and a year from now no one will remember it.  

[Virgil Showlion]

Sept 17, 2014 11:24:20 GMT -5 happyhoix said:

Sept 17, 2014 10:27:53 GMT -5 Virgil Showlion said:

I don't see what business a professional organization has in monitoring--let alone governing--its members' private lives. Disclaim the shameful behaviour, but "It's really not our concern how football players conduct their personal lives." is good enough for me.

That said, I agree with Dark that "Vice President for Social Responsibility" sounds like the title the tobacco companies give the guy who runs around to photo ops with hard workin' tobacco farmers.

Why anybody cares about a few football players with half of the world on fire around us is another mystery for the ages.

Almost everyplace you work has some kind of morality clause that will get you fired if you break the law. 

At my current job, the police came and arrested a pediphile. Took him out in handcuffs. Seized his work computer. There we were, on TV, our company name in big letters over the doorway that the guy was walked through. Do you think we didn't fire his ass that very day?

NFL players get a lot of publicity because they're in the public eye, just like movie stars and politicians. However there are lots of regular people, everyday, who get canned for committing a criminal act. Heck for some jobs you need a security clearance or a DMV report showing you haven't had any accidents, and failing to have that gets you canned.  So sure, companies DO have the ability to dictate to some extent what you can do in your private life.

I understand morals clauses. I have no objection to them. But they're a very definite thing. You break the law, we will terminate your contract.

I don't know the particulars in this case, but I do know that the situation is one of two cases: either 1) the football player(s) in question were not formally charged or otherwise did not meet the conditions of the morals clause, in which case the appropriate response by the NFL is to do nothing, or 2) the player(s) were formally charged or otherwise did meet the conditions of the morals clause, in which case the appropriate response by the NFL is to terminate employment in compliance with the clause.

If the reality is case 2, then the problem obviously is obviously broader than "social responsibility". It's a professional organization that doesn't even enforce its own legal contracts with the players. If the reality is case 1, the NFL stepping back and doing nothing is precisely what they ought to do.

[djAdvocate]

happy doesn't go far enough.  i am not only "not whipped up", i honestly don't even see the issue as some sort of culture war. 

the NFL is a business.  if this happened in, say, General Motors or Exxon, they would pretty much do the same thing.  well, no.  they would fire everyone's asses that even SMELLED like trouble.  the way you have it, that would be some kind of "liberal purging" that is destined to "ruin" corporations.  but that is not how any of the rest of us see it.  we (who run businesses) see it as an effort to avoid lawsuits, bad PR, and having assholes in our midst. 

perspective is a wonderful thing. 

[mmhmm]

Sept 17, 2014 11:19:06 GMT -5 Virgil Showlion said:

Sept 17, 2014 11:06:34 GMT -5 mmhmm said:

That professional organization is interested in the money it makes, Virgil. There's a whole, bloomin' lot of it! Their advertisers are up in arms over certain events and the NFL is concerned about loss of revenue. It's not about caring for the football players. It's about the golden green.

What exactly is the NFL supposed to do about it?

If they want to put a morals clause in the employment contract that states "You will be docked $X.00 in pay if you punch your spouse." and the clause holds legal muster, then by all means do so. Barring that, their relationship with a player starts and ends with the employment contract. It is neither their prerogative nor their responsibility to censure athletes for misconduct in their private lives. We have a system in place for that. It's called "the justice system".

And then this issue of the NFL "releasing video": why does the NFL even have video? At what point did they morph from an organization regulating a professional sport into a de facto news/surveillance agency with a duty to inform the public?

As an organization, their response to the masses demanding "social responsibility" should be that their sole social responsibility is--or ought to be--respecting the role and contractual limits of their relationship with the athletes.

There may well be a morals clause, Virgil. I don't really know as I'm not anything close to informed about the NFL.

As I said, it isn't about what the NFL should do, or has to do. It's all about the buck. Once the advertisers find out about something ugly (and they will - there are those who will make sure they do), they're going to start to squawk. When that happens, the NFL is going to start to worry. How far it all goes depends on how much squawking is done, how much dirt there is behind the squawking, and how the NFL feels the squawking is going to impact their bottom line. Should and have to have nothing to do with it. Politics, liberals, conservatives and/or pelicans have nothing to do with it.

That's my take on it.

[973beachbum]

Sept 17, 2014 11:24:20 GMT -5 happyhoix said:

Sept 17, 2014 10:27:53 GMT -5 Virgil Showlion said:

I don't see what business a professional organization has in monitoring--let alone governing--its members' private lives. Disclaim the shameful behaviour, but "It's really not our concern how football players conduct their personal lives." is good enough for me.

That said, I agree with Dark that "Vice President for Social Responsibility" sounds like the title the tobacco companies give the guy who runs around to photo ops with hard workin' tobacco farmers.

Why anybody cares about a few football players with half of the world on fire around us is another mystery for the ages.

Almost everyplace you work has some kind of morality clause that will get you fired if you break the law. 

At my current job, the police came and arrested a pediphile. Took him out in handcuffs. Seized his work computer. There we were, on TV, our company name in big letters over the doorway that the guy was walked through. Do you think we didn't fire his ass that very day?

NFL players get a lot of publicity because they're in the public eye, just like movie stars and politicians. However there are lots of regular people, everyday, who get canned for committing a criminal act. Heck for some jobs you need a security clearance or a DMV report showing you haven't had any accidents, and failing to have that gets you canned.  So sure, companies DO have the ability to dictate to some extent what you can do in your private life.

But how often does something that extreme happen?  I have found out later, sometimes years, about people getting arrested for things that might have gotten them fired had the company known.  

But how often does it happen that normal people have the prosecutors office sending them copies of the evidence.

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

When I'm right...I'm right:

www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/09/cory_booker_among_two_us_senators_seeking_to_yank_the_nfls_tax-exempt_status.html

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) wants to remove the NFL's tax-exempt status over the league's handling of players linked to domestic violence. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) reportedly wants the exemption gone due to another form of perceived inaction: the NFL's failure to force Washington to ditch the name "Redskins."

The league's 32 NFL clubs aren't exempt from taxes, although the league office operates as a non-profit under the federal tax code. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell could be the highest paid head of any non-profit in the U.S. as he took home $44.2 million in 2012, the most current figure available.

See, I told you so. 

[happyhoix]

I don't know the particulars in this case, but I do know that the situation is one of two cases: either 1) the football player(s) in question were not formally charged or otherwise did not meet the conditions of the morals clause, in which case the appropriate response by the NFL is to do nothing, or 2) the player(s) were formally charged or otherwise did meet the conditions of the morals clause, in which case the appropriate response by the NFL is to terminate employment in compliance with the clause.

I believe Peterson, the child beater, is under investigation and new charges that he also beat another son so hard he left marks have surfaced. So I guess the NFL would have to decide if they would suspend someone or let them keep playing if they are under investigation but not yet convicted of a felony.

I think Rice, the wife beater, got a misdemeanor and had to go to counseling - part of the stink is about how the local DA failed to prosecute this as a felony assault, I believe. If it is just a misdemeanor, and Rice can prove that the NFL failed to fire other NFL players for similar misdemeanors (and there have been other NFL players who were accused of wife beating but weren't caught on tape) he may be able to sue the NFL to get his job back.

I think part of the problem is the NFL doesn't have any cut and dried rules about what, in fact, is a violation of their morality clause. Your chance of getting canned by the NFL is probably directly related to the amount of shit storm your behavior causes in the media.