celery wrote:
You say they knelt to respectfully protest the failure in our country to uphold one of our core values of equality. I understand that this is what the players in their fantasy-football-delusion think they are protesting. What middle America wants to know is how exactly are we not respecting the value of equality? What exact law in America in 2018 is discriminating against anyone?
This is literally one of the things their protest is trying to raise awareness of.
Laws can be discriminatory without being overtly racist. For instance, the federal court in Richmond found that the primary purpose of North Carolina's "voter fraud" laws was to "target African Americans with almost surgical precision". The folks in North Carolina did research to find ways in which they could disenfranchise minority voters and then enacted laws to do so.
In addition to the laws themselves, there is racism in the ways in which laws are enforced in practice. You would have to be delusional to deny that racism influences who gets pulled over, arrested, sentenced, etc. If you look into the sentencing terms for people who have committed identical crimes you'll find that minorities face tougher penalties.
Finally, your rant about BLM is irrelevant, because this is about the principle of equality rather than the perceived behavior or goals of a single organization.
With regards to the original post, my take was that kneeling during the anthem was a quiet protest. Creating an advertisement about it is NOT a quiet protest -- it loudly brings the issue front and center. So yeah, I think it's fine for the NFL to allow quiet protests and forbid noisy ones (and racist ones and political ones too).