Efforts to lure the Washington Redskins back to the District have come up against a potentially insurmountable challenge: the Obama administration’s objections to the team’s name.Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser this spring that the National Park Service, which owns the land beneath Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, was unlikely to accommodate construction of a new stadium for the Redskins unless the team changes its name.
Jewell oversees both national park land and America’s trust and treaty relationships with Native American tribes.Her decision not to extend the District’s lease of the RFK land badly hinders Bowser’s bid to return the Redskins to D.C. — and boosts efforts to lure the team across the Potomac to Northern Virginia.
It is also a blatant abuse of government power and an insult to the spirit and intent of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
The government has no business trying to use its power to influence what owner Dan Snyder chooses to call his football team and his sports company. None. For a member of the President’s cabinet to use any bit of her power to force a private citizen to bend his choice of expression to the administration’s/Democratic Party’s/ political correctness-obsessed Democratic base’s will cannot be defended as consistent with the principles of this democracy. If the Redskins name is acceptable to the team’s fans in sufficient numbers that the team remains popular and profitable (despite the fact that the team has stunk for more than a decade), the fact that victim-mongering Native American activists are offended by the moniker of a team they don’t care about (playing a sport they shouldn’t support) has no relevance to its conduct at all.
Admittedly, it could be worse. If some racist maniac shoots up a reservation after being photographed wearing a Redskin helmet, progressives, cheered on by journalists, will be trying to ban not only the Redskins name, but football, helmets, redskin potatoes and the color red.
I’ll give the Obama minions credit: they are clever about the way they infringe on our rights. This one might stand up to a court challenge, but it shouldn’t fool anyone. Once again, modern U.S. liberals are showing how illiberal they are, and for all their empty rhetoric on tolerance, what they can’t tolerate is diversity of opinion and thought.
Ethics Alarms 
Don’t like the Redskins. Do like the rivalry between the Cowboys and the Redskins. DON’T like the government trying to tell me who I can and can’t like.
Shouldn’t the term “cowboys” be seen as diminuating and offensive? Why has no group sought grievance against that? The term has been around since about as long as Redskins and I’m certain it was no compliment when first developed.
Now now Tex, we both know that Cowboys, along with the Celts and the Vikings refer to white people, and because white people have all the power, discrimination doesn’t apply, because discrimination equals prejudice plus power, and like they assume that all allegedly discriminatory names come from a place of stark whiteness, we must assume that all prejudiced-against-white people names have to come from minorities. Because logic!
Drat, I forgot about that. Or maybe the people called “Cowboys” weren’t out for grievances and assumed the title with an air of pride?
Where in God’s name did you ever get the idea that all cowboys were white? The original cowboys, the vaqueros, were Latino, and ranged from Argentina to what became Colorado.
I think he knows…we’re both being facetious at this point…(though my original comment was only slightly facetious)
Of course, for the argument, his objection still stands…prior to the “Great Latino Grievance Shift of 1836”, Latinos were just as white as Americans and just as evil, starting with Columbus. But nope after 1836 they stopped being white and began to be brown and just as oppressed by white people.
So vaqueros don’t get protection just like cowboys don’t. Well, at least pre-1836 vaqueros…
Man the racial grievance industry gets confusing trying to make all the double standards fit into a consistent set of rules…
Hmm. So, was Juan Seguin a Latino or a white guy? Or was he just a Tejano con-man out for what he could get? He certainly was as corrupt as they come while Mayor of San Antonio.
He’s kind of transitional, so to play it safe he was at first just a unwitting collaborator of white evil (in a way a victim) and then later he was a brown victim of white people.
If Juan Seguin was a creollo (as I think he was) then he was as white as the KIng of Spain! A mestizo is a Latino of mixed white and “redskin” blood. Latinos can be as blonde as a Norwegian or as dark as Al Sharpton. What makes them Latino, apparently, is a Spanish surname. But then again, how do we equate former Mexican President Fox?? Is a puzzlement.
they are all brown victims of white evil. Come on, get with the program.
For both of you, kinda my point. The actual Seguin was NOT the hero that various movies have made him out to be. However, his last name is ‘Seguin’, so he must be a Mexican and, hence, a hero. Not so much. As his tenure as Mayor of San Antonio might suggest, he was a self-serving opportunist, no more.
Well, I won’t condemn him before the conclusion of the war. They were all opportunists – on both sides of the war. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing to rest your hopes of a better future and associated success on fighting for a better political system.
I’m certain Seguin was fighting to end dictatorship in Texas and fighting for republicanism. It isn’t some horrible opportunism that the same system he fought for might give him an opportunity to succeed materially if that same opportunity is also made available to everyone else by his same efforts.
After the war however? Perhaps less ethical. It didn’t help that the flood of American immigrants who had nothing to do with the prewar tolerance between the Anglos and tejanos didn’t give a fig for Seguin because of his ethnicity.
I’ve always harbored the suspicion that the antipathy of Texans for Mexicans was attributable to the Alamo and Goliad. Not to mention Santa Anna’s sexual proclivities.
Ya think?
Ahhh… I forgot!
Goods points. Especially when the ‘cowboys’ started being called ‘cowpunchers’. Still, if the good ole` boys in Abilene object to a bunch in Dallas, shouldn’t the Dallas bunch change their name?
“Native American activists are offended by the moniker of a team they don’t care about (playing a sport they shouldn’t support)….”
Just curious: why shouldn’t a Native American be a baseball fan? Or be an American Indian, for that matter. According to the Baseball Almanac’s American Indian listings and and the website known as “Indian Country”, at least three NAs/AIs or PC-by-tribes (?) are active or semi-active players with the big boys: Kyle Lohse (Twins, Reds, Phillies, Cardinals, Brewers), Jacoby Ellsbury (Yankees, currently disabled list) and Joba Chamberlain (Yankees, Tigers-let go yesterday: Happy Independence, Joba!) who have a World Series ring apiece. Hmmm, and all for the American League: does that say something?).
No doubt the “Redskin” issue is part of the larger problem. Maybe sometimes there just isn’t enough discrimination by its original definition: recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another. As in, say,
“discrimination between right and wrong”
A Washington Post op-ed guy just pointed out Washington was a slave holder and given what’s going on with names and flags in the South, his paper should probably be renamed (and not as the Gazette). So perhaps the Washington Football Club should be fully renamed as the Southern End of the Metroplex Ballers or the South Acela Garnet. A good point.