That darn football team that shall remain nameless

HERE'S THE GREAT commercial that aired during the NBA championship game on Tuesday (June 10).

If the National Basketball League can force Donald Sterling to sell the Cliippers after his racist rant was made public, the National Football League (NFL) can do no less.

The owners of the Washington DC NFL franchise fall back on "tradition" for ignoring the public pleas to change the name to something besides the racial slur that has been compared to the N-word.
Imagine a team named the Gooks, or the Slopes, Kikes, Wetbacks, or any number of racial insults. There would be unquestioned outrage, right?

The hollow argument of "tradition" falls apart when you consider that it was tradition that allowed southern schools to use the Confederate flag as its logo; tradition that kept blacks from playing on baseball teams with whites; tradition that kept country clubs lily-white; tradition kept women in the kitchen and blacks in the back of the bus, tradition allowed segregated schools and poll taxes to prevent African Americans from voting.

While many of those "traditions" have fallen by the wayside one-by-one, the current owners of the Washington team remain steadfast in their knuckle-headed refusal to join the 21st Century.

In the hullabaloo that followed Sterling's diatribe, it is almost forgotten the actions of the team's corporate sponsors. They didn't want to be associated with a racist and they began withdrawing their financial support. That may have been what really forced the NBA to act as it did.

Moral outrage is fine and can be a powerful force, but it is the threat of losing almighty dollars that may have forced the NBA to do the right thing. Maybe that same thing can happen if enough people tell the sponsors of the Washington franchise -- Nike, the brewers and the automakers -- that they disapprove of their association with a team named after a racial slur.