I Hope Jonathan Martin Sues the Shit Out of Incognito, the Dolphins and the NFL

All the macho motherfuckers defending Richie Incognito need to learn some lessons from the wide receiver in this video.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money: 

How the NFL and its supporters have rallied around Richie Incognito over the hazing and threatening of Jonathan Martin is both disgusting and typical. Martin is essentially being drummed out of the league. It’s really hard to see how he returns to the league. It would take the right kind of coach, the right kind of locker room, one that seemingly doesn’t exist in the violent, homophobic, misogynistic NFL. Everyone on the Dolphins supports Incognito and is blaming Martin, saying he wasn’t enough of a man to just punch Incognito in the face, which evidently is the solution to all problems. Peter King is opening his site at Sports Illustrated to a former Dolphin who is basically saying the same thing (I love the “I’m only interested in the truth” line. Ah). What’s more, everyone is saying there’s no way Incognito can be called a racist. After all he did was call his black teammate a “half-nigger,” who could call that racist! We all know that the only real racists in American society are those who support equality for blacks and who therefore are racist toward whites. And while of course no one in the NFL is tying their explanation away or half-apologies for Incognito’s racist text to the modern conservative political definition of racism, they are in fact closely related. In our society, no one is a racist. The mom who dressed her kid up as a KKK member for Halloween? She’s just continuing a family tradition. Why, I bet some of her best friends are black! There evidently are no racists anymore. The word itself has become demonized, as if it doesn’t actually describe certain behaviors and is itself a term more offensive than “half-nigger.” It’s all horrifying.

Also, given all of this, anyone think a gay NFL player is possibly going to come out? And put up with the horrors of the locker room, not to mention other teams? What would Richie Incognito do to a gay teammate? I don’t really want to know.

Yet there are voices of dissent. Travis Waldron at Think Progress:

Stick to the code. Don’t go to others. Be a man. Handle it yourself. Do it any other way, Murtha and others are saying, and you’re weak, soft, not a man.

That’s not how Terrelle Pryor sees it, though. Asked about the Dolphins’ situation Thursday, the second-year Oakland Raiders quarterback applauded Martin’s courage to stand up against the bullies, even if he didn’t do it with his fists.

“I hope that we see [Jonathan] Martin playing again soon – I’ve watched some tape of him, he’s a good player,” Pryor said, according to Raiders.com. “Hats off to him for standing up and being a man.”

But that wasn’t all. Pryor also insinuated that there should have been leaders — men — in the locker room who stood up for Martin and spoke out about Incognito’s problems (which are only looking worse with each passing day).

“There are some situations where sometimes you have to do that, it’s minor things, but you want to cut things off,” Pryor said. “There are so many situations that pop up – your teammate has one drink or something like that and you want to say, ‘Hey, maybe you should take a cab, come take a cab with me,’ something small like that you just get so much respect from your teammate that you stopped and helped him. It’s just little things like that, it matters and that definitely comes in on a leadership role.”

The NFL could use a few more players with Terrelle Pryor’s definition of manhood. It’s a shame the Dolphins don’t seem to have any.