Once again, the Super Bowl Committee has proven themselves to be nothing more than the politicians that they have been criticizing.  They have also exposed themselves to be the hypocrites we all have known they are.

How, you may ask?  Let me explain.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave over the past two weeks, you have no doubt heard about the stupid bill that legislators tried to pass through the Arizona House and Senate.  This is the bill that was pushed through the legislature in order to amend a previous bill’s language to allow businesses to have the right to refuse service to anyone, as long as the decision is based upon their core religious beliefs.

Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but that’s pretty much what it amounts to.  The problem is that it left way too much up for interpretation, which allowed the opposition the ability to convince every group they could find that the bill was aimed at them.

The reality is the bill should never have been generated in the first place.  Just read the first amendment to our U.S. Constitution and you will no doubt agree with me.  Although the precise interpretation of the Religious Clauses portion of this amendment is debatable (if you don’t believe me, have five people read it and then discuss the meaning!!), the intent is pretty clear that the government should stay the $%#@ out of anything to do religious issues when it comes to making laws.

So let’s put the number one blame of this fiasco where it clearly belongs – firmly on the shoulders of the boneheads in the Arizona legislature that created and passed the bill, forcing the Governor into having to veto it.  They should have known better than to think this would ever go through without an enormous outcry from every group in the world that considers themselves a target of discrimination.

From the day it was passed and sent to the Governor’s office for her signature, it was known by everyone in Arizona that it would get the veto stamp.  But that didn’t stop the NFL from seizing the opportunity to make headlines in a pathetic attempt to clean up its recently tarnished image.

Instead, on the day before the day that they knew that she would be pulling out the old VETO stamp, they went in front of the cameras, puffed out their collective chests and threatened to take away next year’s Super Bowl from Glendale, home of the Arizona Cardinals, unless this bill was vetoed immediately.

Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past several years, it’s that the NFL doesn’t take too kindly to people disrespecting other people.  I mean, it’s not like there are professional football players being arrested every week for drug abuse, DUIs, domestic violence, rape and murder.

C’mon guys, give us a break!  This bill was stupid, but it was never going to see the light of day as a law.  But do we really need the NFL leadership talking down their noses at the AZ Guv about discrimination?  I mean, just a few weeks ago a soon-to-be NFL player coming out of the college ranks went public about being gay.  Were there any other NFL headlines for the next ten days?  No!  That’s because the league went into shock, not having a clue about how to respond.

And for the league to make statements about their “core values which embrace tolerance, diversity, inclusiveness and prohibit discrimination”, let’s not forget that this very same league moved Super Bowl XXVII out of Arizona and moved it to Pasadena because Arizona did not yet have a paid holiday for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

In other words, Arizona didn’t look like them and didn’t act like them, so they were discriminated against by them.

I know I’m going to get some heat for that last statement, but only by people who are looking for racism at every corner.  The statement was not racist and neither is the state of Arizona (which currently has a paid holiday for government workers for MLK day).

The reality is the NFL discriminates every bit as much as those they accuse of doing so.  They also have a deep history of not changing their ways when it comes to protecting its workforce (the players) unless forced to do so by lawsuits.

Not to be outdone, the squeaky clean Major League Baseball (MLB) joined in the ranting, publicly crying foul (pun intended) only an hour before they knew the Governor would be stamping away.

Thank goodness they don’t have any skeletons in their closet!!

Here’s an idea.  Let’s have some faith in the American way.  In other words, let’s let the free market decide how businesses decide who to serve and who to turn away, instead of our various levels of government bozos making those decisions for us.

If a potential customer has a choice between multiple business entities, and one of those businesses, in the customer’s eyes, discriminates or does anything that they don’t approve of, that customer needs simply to go across the street to the competition of the “discriminating business”.  In the end, things will work out.

We don’t need a law dictating what we are allowed to think.

And we don’t need the NFL dictating morality to anyone!