JOHN BRUMMETT: The right to offend

The Santa Clara police union threatened last week to boycott the security detail at San Francisco 49ers' home games unless the team did something about the "inappropriate" actions of a player named Colin Kaepernick.

Alas, the police misfired on the two most basic of levels.

The first is that the police ought to remain ever-dedicated to the safety of the public regardless of one offending man. The second is that the supposedly "inappropriate" action was the player's expressing himself personally without causing harm to anyone, which is among the most precious of American constitutional precepts.


Free expression cannot be inappropriate under the Bill of Rights in the United States unless the form of expression is otherwise proscribed in the criminal code. You can't shoot someone or start a fire on someone's property and call it free expression.

But you can otherwise pretty much say what you want and behave as you wish.

You may well lack decorum and restraint. You may well be deserving of onlookers' contempt.

But you're not inappropriate under the Constitution. You're free.

The greatness of American free expression is not merely exercising it, which is the easy part, but putting the heck up with it from people you deem to be creeps and idiots, which can be harder.

A free country cannot require demonstrations of allegiance to its symbols. Fascist countries do that.

Kaepernick is a second-string quarterback, formerly a starter, indeed a Super Bowl starter. A couple of weeks ago, he remained seated during the playing of the national anthem before a preseason exhibition game. He explained that he was protesting police killings of blacks. He'd previously worn socks depicting police officers as pigs.

Faced with criticism that he was being disrespectful of American military veterans, and concerned about that, he talked to a Green Beret, then knelt beside that standing Green Beret during the national anthem at the next preseason exhibition game.

What Kaepernick deserves as a free American second-string quarterback is the right to be observed with the glorious indifference of fellow countrymen who blithely tolerate conspicuousness.

But, no, Kaepernick's actions have risen to the level of Fox News outrage and direct query to the president of the United States, who regrettably joined the vast chorus in taking the matter entirely too seriously.

Obama should have said simply that we all have rights of offending expression in America and that second-string quarterbacks are included. Or he might have said that a lot of Americans express themselves in ways with which he disagrees, and that he'll now add a second-string quarterback somewhere way down that list.

But, per usual, this president felt a need to be somber and thoughtful and even-handed in the matter of the police and blacks. He ever seeks to advance both sides for a listening public that mostly wants to hear only one side or the other, and therefore tends to turn against him for being sensitive to the side it doesn't like.

Just the other day, a Donald Trump supporter told me that Black Lives Matter is a slander against our police. He described it as a destructive, violence-condoning movement that exists solely by the authority of the consoling words of a president who ought to keep his mind closed and his bully pulpit unoccupied on the subject.

That's completely wrong, even outrageous, of course. But that doesn't mean a president needs to nibble on all bait.

When questioned overseas, Obama gave the very kind of fully contextualized answer that infuriates America-first Trumpsters.

The president said he was certain of Kaepernick's sincerity and that the quarterback was raising "some real legitimate issues that have to be talked about."

Not really. The issues must be talked about, yes, but they were being plenty talked about long before one reserve football player wore tacky socks and kept his seat and then took a knee rather than stand for "The Star-Spangled Banner."

This episode is one that lets down American dialogue on all accounts.

We need American citizens like Kaepernick who will take a principled stand. But they would better do so with thoughtful and passionate arguments, not stunts.

We need California policemen who will never waver from doing their jobs to protect public safety no matter how mad they get at a non-standing football player.

We need American media and citizens who know a non-story when they--we--see one.

And we need an American president who stands his ground bravely and thoughtfully, for sure, but can recognize an issue that doesn't rise to his level.

I wish Kaepernick all the best. May he regain the starting job and speak vigorously with well-formulated views and many completed passes.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 09/08/2016

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