Here Come The Scavengers

When an animal is wounded, the scavengers start to circle hoping for an easy meal that they didn't earn. You can see this in nature films and you can see it right where you live if you are sort of in the country. A sure sign that a deer is wounded are the circling vultures. Maybe it is just me but I think I am seeing some circling in our popular culture and the wounded beast is the NFL and the well-publicized mishandling of the Ray Rice situation and the subsequent witchhunt.

First on Ray Rice.

It doesn't matter if "she started it" or "she hit me first". Men don't hit women because it is cowardly and unmanly. There is nothing less genuinely masculine than hitting someone weaker than you and that is doubly true when it involves a woman. PC or not it is still true than generally speaking men are bigger and stronger than women. Just a fact. Yet we find ourselves in an era that tries to pretend that men and women are essentially the same at the same time it decries domestic violence and the "rape culture". This muddled confusion is no surprise. For a generation or more men have been inundated with the message that women are nothing special outside of their ability to provide men sexual gratification and perhaps pay the rent when the man is too lazy to get a job. Little wonder that a guy who is 220 lbs thinks nothing of beating a woman unconscious. When my X-box is frustrating me I turn it off, when a woman back-talks me I shut her up. This is the culture we live in and no one says anything unless someone famous is involved. It is the sign of a complete societal failure that men like Ray Rice think that beating up a woman is ever an option.

Is the NFL player base more prone to domestic violence based on a couple of incidents, ugly as they are, than the general population? I don't know if the statistics bear that out but certainly there are plenty of examples of domestic violence by employees of other industries. So why is this conversation dominating the news? Two words for you: Mad. Stacks. (Yo.) (OK that was three....)

The NFL is one of the biggest cash cows around and is paranoid to a pathological level about its public image lest the gravy train derail.

Lots of cash flow plus a huge public profile = easy target for extortion

Groups are coming out of the woodwork to get in on this windfall, offering consulting services and re-education camps informational seminars to tell a bunch of guys, the vast majority of whom are never going to raise their hand to a woman, that hitting women is wrong. That is something they should have, and most of them have, learned when they were toddlers. Never fear, there is no common sense idea that a high priced consultant can't cash in on!

Raise your hand if you think that the oodles of cash being extorted from the NFL will do a thing to end domestic violence. If you have your hand raised you are a sucker. Just a little honesty for ya.

The very real issue of men hitting women (and that is different from a parent spanking a child for obvious reasons) is one that should be handled by teaching our young boys to be men when they are little. We shouldn't have to pull adult men aside and lecture them with psychobabble mumbo-jumbo about an issue that shouldn't even be an issue. Men hitting women is a failure of the understanding of men and woman as co-equal image bearers of God and the divine design of God in creating two complementary genders. It isn't hard to figure out but watch and see as the NFL pays millions in hush money to make this issue go away. Lawyers and consultants will cash in. Players will be inundated with common sense. The NFL will have protected its mad stacks. Women will still be treated like sex toys and punching bags by men who were never taught the most basic of gender rules: boys and girls are different and boys don't hit girls.