Adrian Peterson Scandal: Minnesota Vikings Taking Wrong Stand
The Vikings Need To Kick Peterson Out Of The Family
Update: The Minnesota Vikings have deactivated Peterson. Get fully up to date with today's Dispatch.
Yesterday afternoon, the Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer told the radio host Dan Barriero that, in so many words, he and his team have a moral obligation to stand by Adrian Peterson as the Vikings running back faces allegations that he beat his four-year-old son so badly with a switch [a small tree branch] last May that when he took his son to a doctor in Minneapolis, the doctor immediately contacted the authorities. “You don’t turn your back on your family,” Zimmer said. “It’s like — and this might be a completely different thing — if one of your family members has cancer, you don’t turn your back on them. You keep fighting for them.”
It wasn’t the first time an NFL coach or player has invoked the family analogy to convey their team’s closeness and loyalty to one another. But it might be the most off base.
Each year, cancer afflicts more than 14 million people worldwide. Many of those people did nothing to cause the cancer; they are simply victims of a disease that doesn’t care if you’re young or old, healthy or not. It just happens, and when someone you love gets cancer it breaks your heart. So no, you don’t turn your back on them.
Adrian Peterson does not have cancer. He severely beat his son with a tree branch, leaving cuts on the boy’s back, buttocks, legs, ankles, and scrotum, as well as defensive wounds on his hands. And Peterson claims that he beat him so hard — and for so long — because he had no idea he was hurting him, because the boy “did not cry.”
If a family member of yours did that to someone else in your family, would you “keep fighting for them?”
Peterson’s supporters, meanwhile, are claiming that he was only “disciplining” his child — a far cry from “abusing” him. And this might be the core of the whole problem: There is no clear agreement on the difference between those two terms, nor on whether it’s OK to hit your kids, or where you can hit them, or how hard, or how many times.
At a press conference Monday afternoon, Vikings general manager Rick Spielman defended Peterson’s actions — as well as his team’s controversial decision to allow Peterson to keep playing as the legal process plays out — saying, “We feel strongly as an organization this is disciplining a child.”
Others, like former Denver Broncos linebacker Tom Jackson, have voiced the opposite view: “I was whipped; a switch by my mom, a belt by my dad,” Jackson said on ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown. “What was done to me and what was done to that four-year-old are different things. That is abuse of a child.”
Zimmer may have put his foot in his mouth by invoking cancer to explain why he’s standing behind Peterson, but maybe there’s a worthwhile moral to be gleaned from the analogy. Cancer is one of the least ambiguous things in the world — either you have it or you don’t. Obviously, the same can’t be said of “discipline” and “abuse.”
But if the Vikings, the NFL, and our whole culture were less equivocal about those terms — and less willing to give abusive behavior a pass under the guise of “discipline” — then Adrian Peterson would not be playing football this Sunday afternoon. He’d be in jail.
We can’t tell Spielman, Zimmer, or the rest of the Vikings to kick Peterson out of their “family,” but we can decide how we react to their decision. The Radisson hotel chain announced yesterday that it is suspending its sponsorship of the team because of the allegations against Peterson, and fans have just as much power. After all, where do you think the NFL’s annual $10 billion in revenue comes from?
If the Vikings want to stand behind a child abuser as one of the “family,” then you need to ask yourself if that’s the kind of family you want to support.
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Football
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Scandal