I get so tired of people, especially holier than thou radio people, saying "Cut him!" "Burn him!" "Throw him in jail!"
They just want their piece of flesh and the vindictiveness demonstrates their short-sightedness and lack of compassion.
If you just penalize these guys and throw them out on the street, you're condemning other women in the future to suffer the same consequences. Most of these guys, if all they get is vitriol, will put up self defense mechanisms and deny any wrong doing.
What Pete and the Seahawks do with and for these guys is amazing. They put themselves out there, at risk for the public to tear them down, all in the interests of helping these young men. Many of them that grew up in households where violence was common place. Or like in Frank Clark's case, their mother is a drug addict and prostitute. Yet people wanted to burn him for alleged domestic violence.
But thanks to Pete Carroll, Paul Allen, and John Schneider, he was given all of the support mechanisms he needed in order to learn that there was a different way to live. Look at him now!
But you have people like Boy Howdy that wanted Jarran Reed cut, although he may just be the victim of "okay, we need someone on here to take this viewpoint." Or Bob Stelton who loves to come across as the moral compass that everyone should follow. NONE of these guys have any idea what's it like to grow up in a "rough" household, where you don't know where your next meal is coming from, or if you need to steal it, and steal clothes to wear to school. Not knowing if your drunk father is going to hit you tonight, or whether the woman he brings home is your mom.
So they have no compassion. They live in clean, antiseptic fantasy worlds where the toughest thing for people like Tom Wassel is "the pressure of going to college."
Now, none of the shit that many kids experience growing up is no excuse for crimes against others. They need to break that chain. But they need to be given the opportunity to do so. They need to be taught that there is another way, and that's the responsibility of society in general.
If we just burn these guys, if teams just cut them and wash their hands of them like was done with Ray Rice, then they are partially responsible for the next woman that gets beat up. Because that's what the offender has just been taught.
"Hey, we love you, well, until you embarrass us. Now you're a worthless piece of shit." No, you take them off the field, then you invest in their education, and healing. It's a team's responsibility to follow through with these guys, and help them to become better men so that they don't repeat this behavior. Like I said before, if you just cut them, if you just wash your hands of them after getting what you wanted, then you are partially responsible for the next woman that gets hit.
If though, a team, much like the Seahawks do, invests in that young man's mental health, then they are doing due diligence. So that IF, that young man repeats that crime, the team can feel confident in what they have done, yet should still look to improve upon what they can do to help those young men who grew up in a shitty life, and only became of value to others when it turned out that they could play a game. And that's a really shitty message to send to someone.
Value them after they've committed a crime. Penalize them for it, give them resources to learn from it and hopefully not do it again, and they will have a chance to break the cycle, while starting a new one. Like the "Boys In T Men" initiative that has taken hold in the PNW.
I don't know enough about the Ray Rice deal to know if this is a good idea or not, but I think the NFL should have worked with Ray Rice, and his Wife, to educate young men about domestic Violence. Instead, everyone acted like Ray Rice was the AntiChrist, and washed their hands of the whole deal, while repeatedly playing the video of him hitting his wife, over, and over, and over. Thanks to that kind of witch hunt mentality, the Wife paid the price too, over, and over, and over. NOBODY took her feelings in to consideration when the made Rice out to be a Pariah.
But hey, they all felt good about themselves. "Look at me, I'm on the right side of this issue." No, you are not. Because you never considered what you could do to educate and prevent future actions such as DV.. Ray Rice and his Wife did. Probably more than anyone else. And that's the sad part.