It’s not actually about the NFL:
As I explained on my radio show, this spectacle is bigger than I am on several levels. There is a contempt in the news business, including the sportswriter community, for conservatives that reflects the blind hatred espoused by Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson. “Racism” is too often their sledgehammer. And it is being used to try to keep citizens who don’t share the left’s agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us. It was on display many years ago in an effort to smear Clarence Thomas with racist stereotypes and keep him off the Supreme Court. More recently, it was employed against patriotic citizens who attended town-hall meetings and tea-party protests.
These intimidation tactics are working and spreading, and they are a cancer on our society.
In the last two years I’ve been subjected to one successful and one unsuccessful attempt to bar me from an opportunity based solely upon my ideological beliefs, which is ironic considering that I am more often in the gatekeeper’s position than I am in the position of one attempting to pass through the gate. As an occasional acquisitions consultant for two publishers, I’ve shot down 10x more book proposals in the last three years than I ever proposed in the entire course of my writing career, let alone had rejected.
My question to those who think it is correct to bar the likes of Rush Limbaugh or me from various opportunities on the basis of our ideological beliefs is this: is it correct for us to bar those who possess ideological beliefs with which we disagree from opportunities that we control? Because if those are the new rules, I don’t have any problem playing that game.