Jon Stewart took the NFL to task for their handling of the ongoing domestic violence scandal, or mishandling as he sees it, during Wednesday night’s installment of “The Daily Show.”
What started with the video of Ray Rice knocking his then-fiancee unconscious in an elevator has escalated to include other examples of violence and even alleged child abuse among members of the league. Stewart broke them each down case by case, mentioning the small punishments meted out by the NFL at first.
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In the case of Adrian Peterson, who has indicted on charges of child abuse for hitting his four-year-old son with a switch made from a tree branch, his team first benched him, then reversed that decision and then reversed their reversal, sending him back to the bench.
“It’s the kind of firm decision we’ve come to expect from people who don’t know what the f–k they’re doing,” Stewart said.
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But then he broke down what he saw as the genesis of that final change of heart. Anheuser-Busch, one of the NFL’s largest sponsors, came out largely against the league’s handling of these cases, along with several other major sponsors.
“So the NFL succumbed to beer pressure,” Stewart quipped. “How crazy is this? A company that sells alcohol is the moral touchstone of the NFL. Alcohol! Maybe one of the only substances that is proven scientifically to increase the likelihood of domestic abuse; That company is saying to the NFL, You guys got a real problem here.”
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He called the newly-appointed group of four women tasked with looking at the NFL’s domestic violence policies the league’s “in-house Special Victims Unit,” and wondered if the NFL was wishing it could go back to the simpler times when their biggest problem was the “distraction” caused by Michael Sam being gay.
“Remember those days? How scared the NFL was back then that a gay man would ruin their league,” he said. “Oh what the NFL wouldn’t do right now for that kind of distraction.”