Anti-American League follies

(As I write, a shouting fascist is attempting to drown out planned free speech addresses by Milo and Pamela Geller, on Berkeley University's Sproul Plaza. Milo had attempted to conduct a Free Speech Week at the California university. But Berkeley's administrators had thrown up numerous financial and logistical impediments to the proposed event, hoping surely to stifle unpopular political expression. 

The Berkeley powers, city government, and the Milo-interrupting shouter represent current fascistic agitations against speech. Tellingly, though, mainstream media voices ignore that genuine suppression of political speech, favoring instead to wail over the counterfeit example dispatched below.)

Always slavering at the prospects of sedition and cultural disorder, news outlets are lousy with agit-prop-sputtering champions of the anti-patriotic posture opportunistically adopted by many in professional sports. 

Nevermind that those pampered and moneyed beneficiaries of America's promise are by no reasonable measure "oppressed." 

Often claimed by sympathetic partisans is that players' free speech rights are at issue. They are not. 

For years a chief union steward, I spent no little time arguing with management over the distinction between employees' private and company-time speech. Sometimes in heated shouting matches.

The NFL's limousine-lolling mock-victims are not communicating privately with fellow workers. Nor are they marching down Main Street on their own time. Were they, then of course First Amendment concerns would apply.  

But salaried players who "take a knee" while the national anthem is played are inappropriately expressing themselves personally while on the company's time. And they were not hired to exploit sports employment as a stage from which to wax philosophically.

When workers, whether they be quarterbacks or carpenters, appear at company functions and are "on the clock" and in the public eye, they are representatives of their employers. In taking the job, they agreed to certain expectations. (For example, wearing whatever uniform or insignia might be required, appearing for work at the scheduled time, not publicly making comments that reflect negatively on the place of business, etc).

In no way at issue, here, are private communications. They rightly enjoy protection. But it is entirely appropriate for employers to expect and take necessary actions to ensure that on-the-job employees not attract negative attention by publicly making statements that do not reflect employers' desired company image. 

And that's hardly an unreasonable requirement. Grocery store clerks, for example, cannot drop their assigned job duties and bellow show tunes whenever the whim strikes them.

Of course, charges of inequality in the administration of justice are well worth general citizen attention. 'Equality under the law' is an American bedrock principle. Its denial to any individual diminishes its soundness and imperils us all.

But sporting events are by their nature diversionary. They are not legitimate venues for weighty deliberation of Constitutional affairs. 

For fans insulted by players' insistence on mounting anti-American spectacles -- ones wholly unrelated to the job for which they were hired -- no longer buying tickets or tuning in are valid options, ones to be pursued. 

After all, if a restaurant server is rude, you might consider no longer patronizing that business. And if many servers, and their bosses, unite in rudeness toward paying customers, even pompously declaring their bad behavior to be 'noble,' no one would expect aggrieved diners to be tolerant and to open their wallets.

For players and owners, then, it's not about speech, but lack of national pride. And for fans, it's about both patriotism and self-respect.