This is the point I'm attempting to make.
The issue is not guilt or innocence. Elliott may be a choir boy.
The issue is that a negotiated CBA gave Goodell the right to do what he did as far as discipline. This has been tested in court on numerous ocassions (the latest being Tom Brady), and upheld.
What Goodell did has more to do with punishing Elliott for projecting an image that, in Goodell's view, is harmful to the business interests of the NFL as to whether Elliott actually did something bad (as defined by law or provable in court) or to what extent.
You may not like that; I might not like that. But the Union and the NFL negotiated that in a contract and the Union wants to change it by finding activist Judges who think they have the right to impose any standard of social "fairness" that they believe in, retroactively, into a previously negotiated contract.
The NFL gave up some things and the Union gave up some things to come to a CBA. That's how it works.
It is unethical for the Union to keep using the Court system to try to overturn parts of the CBA they don't like, now, long after coming to an agreement. And it is just as wrong for Judges to keep granting stays for Elliott just because his lawyers ask for them. The idea that activist Judges have now decided that they are the ultimate arbiters of social fairness, as opposed to being authorized referees in determining whether a law or contract is legal or a person has transgressed the law, is not just undermining the CBA, it is undermining the fabric of our nation and causing tremendous ambiguity and confusion.
And that's why this entire thing is so distasteful to me.
And it's also why these Anthem protests are disgusting to me and must be stopped. What is it exactly that they are protesting and using NFL games as a free platform? It is that they want some undefined vision of "fairness" that they hold, outside of law and contracts, to be imposed on other people. And the irony of it is that these players are very well to do men, the least of them making $10,000 per WEEK!! They act as though they are working for one of Carngie's steel mills in the 20's and being treated like animals and barely surviving a subsistance wage.
