Saturday, September 20, 2014

The NFL Scandal And The False Enlightenment Of Progressivism

     I have tried very hard to avoid news about the manufactured domestic violence problem of the National Football League, and I have tried even harder not to comment about it on this blog. But putting aside the behavior of two of the most prominent symbols of the spurious link between playing professional football and abusing one's wife and children, the "scandal" is illustrative of the degenerative effect that Leftism has had on our culture over the last 50 years, and their desire to draw conclusions on the whole based on the behavior of the few. And the obvious spousal abuse in the one instance and the less obvious child abuse in the other are not important, what has become important to too many in the media and elsewhere on both the Left and Right is the response to the behavior by the offenders' employers.
      The current controversy swirling around the NFL like members of ISIS swirling around a western journalist with his head intact, has created fertile ground for the Left in sports media, as well as the rest of main stream Leftism in America, to harvest the fruits of the seeds they have planted over the last fifty years to replace individual responsibility with collective guilt. This collective guilt allows them to outlaw freedoms that have been taken for granted since our founding. To say that the media on both the Left and the Right have been flogging a dead horse on this issue would be an understatement, they have not only flogged it but skinned it, fileted it, and crushed its bones to be used for mulch.
     The disturbing element of the reaction by the Left/Right media to this "scandal" is the ease with which we as a society have accepted that personal behavior in private life, as horrible as it may be, is the business of employers like the NFL. The Founders would be horrified by the notion of a connection between how a person relates to their spouse and children, and their job. Do we really want employers to be the guardians of morality, or worse yet, the government.? The Framers of the Constitution would have found this idea anathema to every principle for which they fought a revolution.
     The reason that the Founders made no constitutional distinctions or "carve outs" for minors is because they understood that the disposition of children and their discipline laid within the realm of their parents, not the government, and certainly not their employers. As for spousal abuse, yes of course the full force of the law should be brought to bear on offenders, but that still is not within the purview of the offender's employer.
     The NFL and its teams have two priorities, i.e. to win games and make money. They do not exist to serve the social engineering desires of the Left. The Left has successfully inculcated in many Americans that the privacy of personal life is rightly replaced by public scrutiny and intervention. So instead of a nation of individuals as the Founders intended, we have transformed into a nation of nosey nellies, ready at a moments notice to insert ourselves, in the form of government and employers, into the relationships and choices of our fellow citizens. If there is one thing the current NFL situation illustrates it is our willingness to voluntarily sprint down the road of tyranny, with the reckless abandon of ignorance clothed in the false enlightenment of progressivism.

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