The Catholic Defender: A Deeper Look into the NFL's Disrespect Of America

Since 2016 when then San Francisco player Colin Kaepernick first began protesting the American Flag, he was wearing pro-Castro shirts and wearing socks calling the police pigs. This sentiment has been largely pushed by groups like the Black Lives Matter groups who are anarchist. Today the Protest is supposed to be for social justice which coming from millionaires, does not help their cause. It hurts their cause.

The NFL has taken a social debate and turned it into a political hot potato so that the protesters who marched in Ferguson, Baltimore, Oakland, New York, now have infiltrated the football stadiums and television holding captive an unwilling society. I remember when players of the then St. Louis Rams came out of the tunnel with their "hands up don't shoot" expressing their support for the protesters and anarchist who literally burned Ferguson. Dr. Gregory Thompson and I were there praying the Rosary and it felt like a war zone.

Since this "protest" of the American flag has shifted from being pro-communist to one of racial equality, let's take a quick look into the reported facts surrounding the issue at hand. First, I think it is terrible if anyone loses their life especially unjustly, at the hands of the police. It matters not the color of the skin.

Secondly, it is wrong to group all police as if their racist and thugs? The vast majority of them are great honorable servants of our Nation. The attacks on police this past year is an alarming statistic, several ambushes have left many families without a father and a mother this past year alone. Police officers mostly just want to be able to go home to their families after their shift.

The fact is that more white men have been shot and killed by police than black men by a 2 to 1 margin. The Washington Times reported on the subject 21 April 2015, "An analysis shows that more white people died at the hands of law enforcement than those of any other race in the last two years, even as the Justice Department, social-justice groups and media coverage focus on black victims of police force. Any “analysis” of police killings will of course show that in absolute numbers, more white people are killed in police shootings than black people, because (non-Hispanic) whites comprise a roughly five times greater share of the U.S. population (62% vs. 13%)."

What clouds the numbers is that more black men are involved in crime so as a minority, they have more incidence per population. Some of the shootings became national headlines like that of Terence Crutcher, a 40 year old unarmed Black American man from Tulsa Oklahoma.

Here is an interesting break down from Washington Post Journalist D Brian Burghart who began tracking this in 2015 shared these results:

According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population.

As The Post noted in a new analysis, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. According to Fatal Encounters, the database created by former Reno News & Review editor and journalism instructor Burghart (which tracks all deaths resulting from interactions with police), a total of 1,388 people were killed by police in 2015, 318 (23%) of them black, and 560 (40%) of them white. So roughly 23 percent of those killed by any police interaction in 2015 were black and just over 40 percent were white. According to those statistics (adjusted for racial demographics), black people had a 2.7 higher likelihood of being killed by police than whites.

The grim trend has carried over into 2016. Of the 1,034 people killed and tracked by Burghart’s Fatal Encounters database so far this year, 215 were black while 338 were white, so thus far in 2016 black Americans have been three times more likely than white people to die in interactions with police.

What most studies suggest on the subject is that the breakdown of the American Family has had a huge impact especially on Black Americans who consistently have a 70% birthrate without Fathers in the picture, and many of the fathers themselves are into gangs and crime.

Instead of boiling over into America's favorite pastimes protesting the American Flag, National Anthem, and our troops, they should be taking a knee every night before they go to bed praying for this Nation, for their families, and a decrease in crime. We do not want to legitimize crime by legalizing it, but to offer jobs and a better hope for America.

These "protesters" hurt their own cause as members of my own family refuse to watch Sunday NFL anymore. Sean Hannity has made Saturday his day of football as this protest has not yet entered into College yet.

I have a strong military background serving more than 26 years in the Army. My immediate family have served in more than 20 deployments primarily to the Middle East. We have seen the horror of war first hand. To try and redefine what a desecration is as the NFL has done is without conscience. We will be declining our Direct TV NFL Package for 2018.