Monster in the Closet

The NFL does not care about domestic violence. This may mirror the attitude of a lot of society, but, it turns out, not as much as the NFL thought it would.

Yes, Ray Rice behaved like a monster. Maybe he is repentant. Maybe he is getting help. I hope those things are true for him and for his family, but he committed a crime when he beat Janay Palmer and had this tape not magically appeared, he would have suffered the consequence of a two-game penalty because this is what the NFL thinks that we think of domestic abuse.

But Lo, Goodell heard the outcry, Two games? Two games for this man that was on video dragging a live person down a hall with less care than he manages for his football equipment? That is some bullshit, commish! And Lo did the commissioner say unto the public, I hear your outcry, for I am not a monster, and he did change that rule and all was well. Phew. Are you ready for some football?

And that was that, until this. TMZ releases a tape early Monday morning and suddenly everything changes. Because now it's real. Ray Rice punched a women and knocked her out and that is a disgusting thing, so the Ravens fire him. Then Goodell fires him. Goodell, who had just decided that two games was too few and six games was appropriate for a first offence sees this video and outright fires him.

Is Goodell so disgusted by what he sees that he decides six games is not enough?

Did Goodell not realize that domestic violence is about literally beating on your partner? Did it just become real to him? I can't understand how this is so abstract to so many people. How they didn't get it until they saw Janay being knocked out. How they have to substitute a sister/mother/wife/child/animal to relate. I do not know a single woman that needed any of these aids to make this properly horrifying.

And here is the most depressing part: nobody cares. Nobody cares about the crime committed by Rice. It airs on TV over and over again. I have watched Janay's legs being dragged down the hall like a fucking carcass enough times to sketch it from memory but all anybody can talk about is the NFL getting caught with their pants down, where the real evil is in the cover-up, in the NFL's arrogance believing that they could suppress evidence and not get caught because FOOTBALL.

But why is this a conversation? They already fucking knew. Everybody knew. The court knew. The Ravens knew. Roger Goodell knew. You knew. I knew. Everybody fucking knew that Ray Rice knocked out Janay Palmer when they saw him dragging her down the hall, watched him dragging her, on the internet, on the news, watched this video of him dragging her over and over and over again. Second tape or not, everybody knew that this violent, heinous act had taken place and didn't do a thing about it because FOOTBALL.

Whether or not the NFL saw the second tape and lied about it is irrelevant in light of the fact that all the evidence they needed was on the first tape. It is irrelevant in light of the fact that beating up women is so clearly wrong and when they had the opportunity to take an easy, obvious stand, they did not.

So, again, why is this cover-up the conversation? People are talking of Goodell “falling on his sword” but isn't optics what got you into this mess in the first place? Perhaps if the NFL were to stop trying to cull and anticipate reaction and just try thinking like a human it would do more toward dissembling this culture of blamelessness and entitlement where the act of beating up on your partner or trying to manipulate the public are just dirty little secrets meant to be kept secret.

Goodell sacrifices himself and what? Clean slate? This is how we got here. Sport does not exist in a bubble, it exists in the same world, on the same plane, as the rest of humanity. Maybe when it comes to human decency it should follow the same rules, messy as they may be. If these guys had taken this issue seriously in the first place, we would not be here right now.

So here is my advice for the NFL: Clean your fucking closets.