The Single Most Telling Fact About the NFL Protests …

is that the same guy who did this during the playing of the national anthem …

… later did this upon scoring a touchdown:

(If you want to see the whole video, you can “enjoy” it here.) These are the kinds of people from whom we are getting our political statements nowadays.

So, yes, the NFL protests are largely a distraction from more serious issues. But condemning those protests is not the act of a “partisan hack” or engaging in “establishment wedge politics” as this story suggests. That’s because this isn’t really about race or free speech or injustice or anything so high-minded. And yet it’s about something that, in many ways, is still more basic and important to a functioning society.

As I’ve described in my article on the protests, the issue is one of adhering to what should be simple, unquestioned norms of civility and respect. For the exact same reasons that it’s inappropriate to imitate a peeing dog upon scoring a touchdown, it’s inappropriate to piss on someone else’s parade when they’re engaging in what is no more than a bland, ceremonial ritual to display generic patriotic reverence, i.e., standing for the singing of the national anthem. The same “unsportsmanlike conduct” penalty flag that was thrown by the officials in reaction to a player miming a dog pissing on his opponents should be thrown by all of us in reaction to a bunch of players pissing on our norms of public civility, etiquette and respect.

If these players want to poo-poo America, that’s their business, and others will judge them howsoever they will, but how and when they make their case matters. We cannot live in a functioning democracy if we do not respect each other, and yet it’s precisely these kinds of core values of respect and civility that are rapidly disappearing from our midst, as more and more of us substitute insults, epithets and curses for constructive dialogue or engaged disagreement. And so #BoycottNFL is, to me, nothing more than standing up for respect, a value without which all our other values will fall by the wayside in an escalating war of all against all.