NFL Embraces LGBTQ+, Gun 'Ban', Jan. 6, Other Liberal Causes While Ignoring Conservative Views
The NFL during the 2022 offseason? It is admittedly about big trades (Davante Adams, Matt Ryan), big contracts for receivers (A.J. Brown, Adams, Tyreek Hill, Stefon Diggs and others), and big contracts for the stars (Cooper Kupp and Aaron Donald) who helped the Los Angeles Rams win the Super Bowl.
The NFL of the 2022 offseason is, in other words, much about what we've all come to expect of the most popular sports league in America.
But it's also about some other things.
Controversial things.
Divisive things.
Things the league would have never touched a generation ago or perhaps even a few years ago. Things that enchant half the country and enrage the other half.
And, apparently not coincidently, the side always enchanted is the political left. And the side the league routinely enrages is the political right.
This isn't an opinion. There can be no debate about this.
This is fact with today's NFL.
And the league isn't hiding from this in any way. It's out in the open about what it supports. Just look at the NFL's Twitter account.
The pinned tweet is promoting LGBTQ pride month. Except the NFL doesn't just say it's celebrating pride month. It says "we are proud to support and advocate for the LGBTQ+ community every day, not just in June."
The NFL then outlines the number of inclusive marketing efforts it has undertaken under the auspices of its "Football is Gay" campaign.
The NFL says football is gay. Think about that.
Not football is football. And certainly not faith, family and football.
Football is gay.
Now we scroll down the NFL's Twitter feed and we get some football. And then two days ago we see a tweet which says "The NFL family came through for the #pride parade in Los Angeles this weekend" with a subtweet that adds #NYCPride June 26, as in meet the NFL there in a few days.
And what's the big deal, you may ask? After all it's a parade during a month in which the lifestyle some people have lived since the dawn of time is celebrated, right?
Except that pride parade in Los Angeles included drag queens on floats and high heels, BDSM marchers, puppy play kinks, men in speedos twerking for the crowd as in a burlesque show, and other sexually provocative themes.
A sample of the often explicit behavior, in front of toddlers and other minors, is online on YouTube and other social media.
Here is one of the more tame samples:
The Washington Commanders, who have had some serious logo issues the past few years, this year unveiled their new helmet logo as a "W." That's it.
W.
Except for June the club colorized the W rainbow style in obvious celebration of pride month. And on Sunday the team tweeted how much "fun" the Capital Pride DC parade was.
Interestingly, neither the Commanders nor the NFL has mentioned that several of these pride events included drag queen story time sessions for 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds, in which the drag queen shows the children how happy same-sex couples look in a story book.
This is not a takedown of gay people or their lifestyle. Whatever they want to do, however they want to live their private lives is their business.
This is, however, a takedown of the NFL and its teams celebrating the lifestyle. And doing so without equal acceptance to the other side -- many of whom happen to be NFL fans, also.
Consider that I could not find the last time the NFL's social media account or an NFL media release promoted the traditional family that includes a married mother and father and their children.
Consider what happened on April 17. The NFL tweeted about players who impressed at the NFL combine. It tweeted about the excellence of Ohio State receivers Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson. It tweeted mock draft projections.
All these tweets came on a day 63 percent of the people in America who classify themselves as Christians were marking the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter or Resurrection Sunday.
Did the NFL mention this on its social media? Celebrate it?
Nope.
Did the NFL wish anyone a happy Resurrection Sunday? Was there a happy Passover tweet by the league? A happy Ramadan tweet?
Nope.
Celebrating monotheistic religions is a no-go zone for the NFL in 2022.
(Some NFL teams did have fun hijacking the Christian holy-day by tweeting about bunnies and colored eggs, as if that's what the day is about.)
This could not possibly be because the NFL wants to avoid offending fans by proselytizing. Because the league has enthusiastically taken up the cross of converting fans to its liberal world view.
The league is full on gun control, tweeting and retweeting multiple times how some weapons should be "banned" -- not controlled or more wisely sold but outright banned!
This while never tweeting that the United States has a Constitution whose second amendment reads in its entirety, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
The NFL retweeted Eagles owner Jeffery Lurie when he released a statement following a Philadelphia mass shooting in which three people were killed and 11 others were injured.
Lurie in that statement, which obviously the NFL agrees with, advocated for an outright ban on "assault weapons and high capacity" magazines -- regardless whether they're owned by law-abiding citizens, regardless of what the Republic's founding document, adopted at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in, wait for it, PHILADELPHIA, says.
On Tuesday the league tweeted to its 30 million followers a 27-second clip from Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow who spoke on gun control in terms the league likes. This is what Burrow said:
"With everything that's going on, if you're not going to outlaw everything, you've got to, at least, make it harder to get those crazy guns that everybody is using. I don't think you should be able to just walk in there and buy one, you got to be able to go through a rigorous process to buy something like that, I think. Hopefully, the people who get paid to make those decisions figure that out."
And anyone reading that might be convinced to agree because they don't realize social media is no place to be educated and no one fact-checked Cincinnati's 25-year-old quarterback.
The fact is gun purchases must be run through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) which is administered by the FBI.
And there are on the books over half a dozen reasons people routinely are denied gun purchases including being convicted of a crime that carries a sentence of more than one year, or a misdemeanor that carries a sentence of over two years, as well as being an addict, or being diagnosed as mentally ill, which can include being involuntarily committed, found not guilty by reason of insanity, or found unfit to stand trial.
The NFL hasn't tweeted out what the laws on the books actually say, I suppose, because social media is better suited for a quick political sound bite and then on to the next thing.
So the league hasn't used its platform to ask district attorneys in violent NFL outposts such as Chicago, Baltimore and Philadelphia to more strictly enforce the laws already on the books. It hasn't asked government agencies, including ones in the town the Commanders represent, to be more proactive in flagging people who have shown signs of mental distress.
The NFL certainly hasn't implored people read the Torah or the Bible as a Hail Mary against the wickedness of school shootings. (Mock if you wish, but it is fact school shootings started rising after prayer was taken out of schools.)
The NFL certainly has not suggested to its own constituency -- including players, of which about half that I've ever met own hand guns, rifles, and shotguns -- that they disarm.
The league is instead going along in June of 2022, with its big trades, big contracts, big teases for the coming season -- and its big embrace of liberal positions, at the expense of or disregard for conservative views.
Follow on Twitter: @ArmandoSalguero