“Flipping the bird is always the same message”
Not at all. Sometimes it is an indicator of group solidarity.
“Tebow knelt during the anthem through his whole career. Now he was kneeling in prayer not in protest”
How do we know that? Because he told us. And how do we know that the miscreants were kneeling with the intent to engage in misconduct? For the same reason.
“Unless behavior during the anthem is codified”
We need to bring back the reasonable man standard.
“trying to after the fact declare some behavior misconduct”
Come on. Everybody saw that it was misconduct from the very first.
No flipping the bird is always the same message. Even if it’s group solidarity it’s group solidarity by flipping off some OTHER group.
But you just outlined the problem. The kneelers can easily say they were praying for justice. Now you’re stuck because they’ve just functionally erased the line between prayer and protest.
We still have a reasonable man standard. Problem is who’s being defined as a reasonable man. The fact of the matter is the vast majority of fans don’t care. Bring this fight to the courts and the kneelers will point to the 80% of fans NOT boycotting and say “the reasonable men have no problem with it”.
Nope. People didn’t even notice Colin wasn’t standing during the anthem until after the second game he did it. So in fact at the start NOBODY saw that it was misconduct. And most people just aren’t that upset about it.