Thread:Comments:US National Football League to fine teams if athletes kneel during national anthem/Why is Colin Kaepernick still relevant?/reply (3)

What seems to be lost on most people, on either side, is that the players are at work. The First Amendment guarantees the freedom to express your political views, through words or gestures, however, not when you are on the job. The players are communicating directly to the customers while wearing the uniform of their employer. I can guarantee you, I would have been fired on the spot if I started espousing my own political views to the customers of my former employer. Similarly, I would want the bank teller to tell me who to vote for while I am making a deposit at the bank. The extent to which an employee can express their own personal views is entirely at the discretion of the employer. This rule change does not infringe on their freedom of speech. Each and every one of the players can go on Twitter or a street corner and freely express their views when they are off the field. Moreover, these are professional athletes, some of them superstars. They have no trouble getting an interview with TV or the press, if they have a message they want to get across. They have more free speech than most in the sense they have a bigger soapbox. That being said, Donald Trump should not have interjected himself into this. It is not the President's place to weigh in on the minutiae of employee/employer relations. And for this, we saw a Streisand effect with the kneeling protest spreading across the league, putting the team owners in a real bind. Obama's comment was wrong too. He referred to a history of athletes protesting, well, I assume he was referring to the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute. If so, they were amateurs and not representing a corporation who was paying them, which changes everything. If he was referring to The Cleveland Summit, well, these athletes made their free speech off the field, and very powerfully so.