What the NFL’s Domestic Violence Scandals REALLY Teaches

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell

The NFL has opened the 2014 Season with a firestorm. Unfortunately for the NFL that firestorm hasn’t been around its games as much as around the conduct of some of its players.

The scandal started with the now infamous Ray Rice video and the NFL’s paltry two game suspension for Rice.

In Roger Goodell’s defense, the NFL Commissioner was simply following the SAME tack taken by law enforcement which DID NOT pursue criminal penalties in the case.

Rice was initially charged with assault by the Atlantic City police in the early hours of February 15^th. But on March 27^th, an Atlantic City grand jury, presumably after watching all the Revel casino security camera videos, increased the charge to aggravated assault-bodily injury in the third degree and one count of simple assault. If convicted, Rice faced a penalty of three to five years in prison.

Rice's defense attorney, Michael J. Diamondstein of Philadelphia, then applied for pretrial intervention (PTI), a remedy that allows defendants to avoid conviction if they complete a court-ordered set of requirements. Apparently Goodell took that and Janay Rice’s testimony supporting her husband into account in rendering the 2 game suspension.

What I’ve taken from this ongoing scandal is two things; (1) there seems to be quite an appetite for a return to chivalry (protecting women) and (2) the media seems to either be belatedly waking up to widespread black dysfunction, OR (perhaps more likely) loves attacking blacks, so long as they are also “rich.” To date, ALL of those ground up in these domestic & now child abuse scandals are black.

I’m somewhat more interested in the former, that apparent return to chivalry, as it seems so incongruous coming, as it does, from those who also strongly support “women in combat,” and “more females in firefighting,” etc. There appears to be a disconnect there.

YES, women tend to be smaller, with far less upper body strength than men, so it would seem they NEED some societal protections, HOWEVER, if we acknowledge that a woman cannot fight a man and win (she CANNOT), then she also SHOULDN’T EVER be allowed in military combat, or in firefighting either...if you can’t fight a man, you almost certainly can’t fight a fire effectively either.

Nature is what it is and we are left to abide by that. We CANNOT and would not want to change the size and strength disparity between males and females, as it is so much a part of the physical attraction that leads to the very propagation of our species, so we set about protecting those who need protecting. Such sentiments tend to go away with women in combat positions, asserting that they can “fight as effectively as any man.”

I blame a LOT of this on that circus clown Bobby Riggs, who while making sport of Billie Jean King’s call for “gender equality in tennis,” also kindled a nefarious fiction that has only grown, despite ALL evidence to the contrary through to today.

In the 1980s male tennis star Vitas Gerulaitis garnered outrage by claiming, “The #1 female tennis player couldn’t beat the a male tennis player in the top 100.”

That “outrage” was itself ignorance. EVERY sport is divided between male and female because no woman in any sport can compete with any high performing male player. That’s why female tennis matches are a best two out of three, while men’s are a best three of five and why female golfers tee off closer to the greens and off of higher “lady tees.”

WHY is it inconvenient to acknowledge such a basic truth?

Recently female fighter Rhonda Rousey claimed she thought she could beat male boxer Floyd Mayweather in a MMA event. Good publicity, wrong-headed in every other conceivable way. IF such a fight were sanctioned and ended as it invariably would, the SAME champions of Rousey’s calling for such a fight would then deride it as “criminally sanctioned abuse.”

I admit that I am very unfamiliar with MMA fighting and equally unfamiliar with and disinterested in female boxing, BUT my view has always been, “WHY watch female boxing, except for the tits and ass? I am pretty certain that a male high school aged Golden Gloves boxer would beat ANY professional female in the ring.

What do I base that on?

Well, in 1971 I ran a 1:54.2 half mile (slightly more than 800 meters). In the 1976 Summer Olympics Tatyana Kazankina of the then Soviet Union set a women’s World Record in the 800 meters of 1:54.94. In short I beat the women’s world record holder in the Olympics held FIVE years later, when I was in high school.

And my school had 21 guys under 2 minutes in the half mile back then and I was NOT close to the best of us.

If “men and women are not so different,” males and females certainly ARE!

All this chivalry is good, so long as even greater common sense comes out of this. Let’s unceremoniously end any more calls for women in combat and let’s take a much more skeptical look at women in firefighting, commercial fishing, mining and other such “death professions.”