How can he pass with a back that looks like that?

The new star San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick is tattooed all over. Does this mean that he is unqualified to be a leader, a role model, an ethical exemplar, as NFL quarterbacks are supposed to be? The Sporting News’ columnist David Whitley argued in a column that indeed Kaepernick’s tattoos do mean that, and as you would expect, the number of coherent points he could mount in support of that position equaled exactly zero. He did, however, give everyone a terrific example of how people who don’t comprehend ethics make what they think are ethical arguments.

His column is about ethics, because ethics is central to leadership. Whitley believes that Kaepernick’s tattoos undermine his ability to lead by compromising the values he represents to those who must follow him. And those values that tattoos undermine are??? Well, Whitely doesn’t really explain that. He says that tattoos on a quarterback send the wrong message because prisoners get tattoos in the Big House. This is a man who is hostage to cognitive dissonance. Presumably if Stephen Hawking or Barack Obama showed a tat, he’d be fine with Kaepernick’s decorations. When I was kid, it wasn’t prisoners but sailors who we identified with tattoos. I knew a Pearl Harbor survivor with a big one—this neither convinced me that he was a rotter instead of a hero or made me want to get a giant anchor needled into my arm. Popeye had a tattoo, and we all loved Popeye. He also ate spinach. We didn’t. Continue reading →