The NFL certainly has the right as a business to do what it wants in administering it’s business. Personally, I have mixed feelings on players kneeling during the Star Spangled Banner. It’s something I would never do, and I’m not sure it helps the cause(s) they are advocating. But, I do believe they have the right to do so. And of course, people have the right to watch, or not watch NFL games.

I think it’s interesting to see what the Supreme Court said in 1943, while our country was in the middle of WWII. The Court held, in a 6-to-3 decision, that it was unconstitutional for public schools to compel students to salute the flag. The Court wrote that any “compulsory unification of opinion” was doomed to failure and was antithetical to the values set forth in the First Amendment. The Court stated:

“To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”

The Supreme Court announced its decision on June 14, Flag Day.