Its a Goddamn football game! It has all the patriotic gravity of a middle school pep rally! If the national anthem is to embody patriotic devotion, to be a ritual of worship, it should not be cheapened and degraded. For sports? If NFL players were shredding each other’s brains for their country, that might be one thing.
Okay, so you are reading responses from some other thread and attributing them to me? I really don’t think I am obligated to respond to extreme re-interpretations of what I actually post, so when you decide to dispute what I actually post, let me know.
This is a ridiculous argument.
Kneeling in church is totally different, in terms of context and meaning. This makes as much sense as saying “dropping trou in a bathroom is fine so why can’t I do it in a court of law?”
Since this is a new thing, where did you get the idea that he was doing it to disrespect anything, up to and including the national anthem and the flag? He said why he was doing it-do you believe he was lying about his intentions?
So is flipping off the flag the flag and kneeling before the flag completely the same thing to you?
Seriously, this whole “Black people aren’t protesting right” thing is getting a little old.
I have never seen anyone kneel like that to disrespect some ideal, but I have seen it done many times as a sign of someone praying…so what and/or who put the idea in your head that this was some new way to disrespect something? Images of players praying during sporting events.
Yesterday (literally), I was in a classroom where the Pledge of Allegiance was being recited. I stood respectfully, but despite being a U.S. citizen, I neither recited the words, nor placed my hand over my heart.
Given the context, what do my actions reveal about my intention?
That’s what I’m responding to. People did not boo (to my knowledge), when he remained seated, out of uniform, twice (aug 14th, 20th), and once when he was in uniform on the 26th. He did not take a knee until September 1st. That’s the first recorded booing I have.
So, my assumption of your line of thinking, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that everybody booed because they read a hit piece on him, that contradicted his own words?
That’s a nice theory, but it also happens to coincide with the first time he kneeled, in uniform, so there’s multiple explanations that don’t require that theory. The fans did not preemptively boo Kaepernick, it happened a few seconds after he and Reid took a knee (and two players is more conspicuous than 1, that’s the first time that happened too).
Here is an explicit statement by Eric Reid regarding the intention of Kaepernick and himself in kneeling. Anyone making the argument that this was a gesture intended as a show of disrespect directed at anything except those who would claim that there is no inequality in how black people are treated is being disingeneous to the extreme. It’s purely manufactured outrage over a non-existent slight by the most thin-skinned denialists and flag-draping ‘patriots’ who fear that even the mildest criticism of of any aspect of traditional American society will cause it to collapse into a hot mess of multiculturalism or…something. The upset is so wholly artificial it’s actually difficult to tell what they’re actually upset over except for losing an exclusive status.
You guys keep coming up with non-sequiturs? Any more? That’s the pledge of allegiance, not the national anthem. And it was in a school. Which has established case law behind it since 1943.
And there is dick-all case law against kneeling for the national anthem, and yet you announce that people have to stand as though that’s carved in stone.
Maybe people are upset that the last freakin tradition where americans stood in solidarity for a few moments was going down the crapper. But no, it HAS be be about race, doesn’t it?
My assumption would be that the people who bood bood because they they were confused and, having some critical shortage of brain cells, somehow connected “kneeling” to “disrespect” despite that being quite literally among the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. Kneeling has precisely two meanings:
You are showing submission, subservience, or respect
or
Your shoe is untied.
To assume that somebody kneeling is being disrespectful is stupid, full stop. (To keep assuming that after you’ve been explicitly corrected by the person doing it is even stupider, full stop.) If there’s a non-moronic argument defending this particular moronic leap of faith, I’ve yet to hear it.
That said - some people are morons. (I’d be willing to hazard that foodball game audiences have more than their statistical share of morons, but that’s mostly because I don’t watch football.) In any sufficiently large crowd I would expect a certain amount of booing at any unexpected action. That’s not an indicator that the booing was in any way justified.
It’s my understanding that people have started paying more attention to BLM-type stuff as a result of it, so it’s very odd that you keep repeating the demonstrably false claim that “nobody is better off for it”.
I will agree that “the optics were bad” - there were whole networks of lying bigots deliberately trying to paint them as bad, and that counts as “optics”.