Ummm.. BananaStand, you read a whole lot into my post that absolutely was not there.
I guess I wasn't completely clear, but this being a poker forum, I thought the fact that I was critiquing their play, not their morals would be picked up on. I'm fairly agnostic on whether CK deserved to lose his job over this, whether or not he did lose his job over this (I don't follow football closely, and I'm not sure who to believe regarding his skills), whether it's morally objectionable to fire a player for this sort of protest, etc.
What I do know is that it appears they did fire him for it, and there are now a whole host of players taking a knee, who are almost certainly less valuable to their given teams than CK was, and who are not going to be fired over it. What gives?Whether they had the moral high ground in firing him-- whether he was being disrespectful or whether he was using his position to respectfully highlight a social issue that he finds important, the 49'ers appear to have made an example of him, and the other teams at least tacitly supported this move when they refused to open their club to CK. And the move backfired. Football is mired in a more divisive atmosphere now. Their apparent bluff was called, and now they're paying up.
Again, I'm fairly agnostic about the morality on all sides here-- but I think there's some strange doublethink going on in your post. As I understand it, you think that it is not morally objectionable for an employer to fire staff for not participating in patriotic pageantry. Therefore it follows, there is no issue with an employer forcing staff, by threat of termination, to perform overt patriotic gestures.
I don't want to misrepresent the facts on the ground, nor do I want to misrepresent your position here-- so please let me know where I made a leap.
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