Though the possibility of a player boycott of tomorrow night’s All-Star Game in protest of Arizona’s SB 1070 was raised over a year ago by the Mets’ Carlos Beltran, though his union’s executive director, Michael Weiner (above) argues the constitutionality of the bill should be “addressed in Congress and in statehouses and in courts” rather than at Chase Field. Calling SB 1070, “a law so bad it had to be rewritten while the ink of the original signatures was still drying,” (“SB 1070 isn’t really a law at all in the conventional sense. It’s a piece of performance art. It’s community theater,”), ESPN.com’s Jeff MacGregor takes a dim view of Weiner’s stance, or lack thereof.
Sorry, but no matter how dire the economy or the national emergency, racial profiling is antithetical to the American experiment. If we encourage by complicity, or even by silence, legislation like Arizona SB 1070, we lose whatever battle it is we think we’re fighting.
The Constitution needs to be more than just a piece of bright bunting or bit of decorative crepe hung on the hobbyhorse of our preferences and prejudices. Once we sacrifice our founding principles in service of our fears, we give away our right to their protections.
The irony here is that sports are almost entirely pragmatic. They favor what works and discard what does not. American politics, on the other hand, has become a kind of dream state in which ideology trumps ideas and magical thinking is the only kind of thinking we can manage.