“Why is Colin Kaepernick still unsigned?”
That's not hard to answer. He
engaged in political grandstanding while on the job and wearing the
uniform of his employers. That's not a legally protected form of freedom
of speech. If you choose to do that sort of thing, there are likely to
be consequences. I know that if I did something like that I would have been sacked on the spot and quite correctly. This has nothing
to do with the correctness (or lack thereof) of the message he was
trying to communicate. It has to do with respect for your employers and
maintaining a professional deportment when you are on the clock and
wearing the company uniform. If you want to protest something, you do
it on your own time and in your own clothes.
But rapists, animal abusers, and wife beaters are fine!
ReplyDeletePlus he's about as good an NFL QB as Tebow.
ReplyDeleteHi, John,
ReplyDeleteI agree with everything you have said here, and I do not question or dispute a word of it. If you are on the job, you stay professional at all times.
On the other hand, I am very worried about the fact that our ruling elites try to get around the First Amendment by "outsourcing" censorship and speech suppression to corporations like Facebook, Google, et al. When the Founders drafted the First Amendment, they could not have foreseen this scenario. Technically, it is perfectly legal for Google, YouTube, Facebook, et al., to suppress your material, since they are not the "government." Practically, it is no different than if the FBI or Homeland Security hauls you off to Guantanimo. The effect is the same.
This is why I ultimately lost patience with the Libertarians. They are so ideologically fixated on the State, that they cannot see that tyranny can come from many sources.
Under these circumstances, a "Colin Kaepernick" (of whatever political persuasion) may have no other way to address the public square than though an unprofessional stunt like this. In other words, I see a larger story here, which needs to be addressed.
I think the guardian is wondering more about American culture and why
ReplyDeleteKaepernick's actions are so controversial. Well protests like his are not typically popular in the political sense, the issues underlying them are manifestly legitimate and true. The UK has a long history of protest against their equivalent of our idolization of our flag, their monarchy.