Let's Ban Professional Sports *2nd Amendment SATIRE*

NB: Tried this at several satirical websites but some of the humor was too high brow. I mean who jokes about the Ninth Amendment?

The government should ban sporting events forthwith because they encourage the consumption of alcohol and other inebriates, gambling, harming animals, idleness, and violence. It doesn’t matter that millions of Americans love to watch sporting events live or on television because sports are not explicitly protected by the Constitution, they divert resources away from BIPOCs, and they emit literally tons of carbon into the atmosphere.  

Anti-sporters like myself have never played or watched any professional sport in our lives, but we know everything there is to know not to like them and that is sufficient to call for a ban. Millions of Americans just like me wonder how long policymakers are going to allow this, this, this genocide to continue. It has got to stop and here is why.  

First, while like-minded allies long ago managed to curtail alcohol sales late in games, all that did was to induce people to start drinking earlier. Now, we’ve discovered via a thorough investigation conducted on Tik Tok, fans show up in the parking lots of sporting events hours early so they can get drunk, gorge themselves on animal products, and likely fornicate too.  

Some might say that impaired driving, not alcohol or drug use per se, kills people and that responsible drug and alcohol use isn’t hurting anyone. Those people are idiots. We don’t have any reliable statistics, but we know that literally millions of babies have been killed by drunk or high sports fans. (Yes, some of those babies may have been squirrels but squirrels are people too!)  

Namby-pamby types will also claim that gambling doesn’t hurt anyone, except the losers, but they knew what they were getting into. But gambling is an addiction, just like drinking and drugs. Again, we don’t have statistics, but we heard an anecdote about a baby run over by a guy checking his phone to see if “da Iggles” covered the spread. We don’t know what that means exactly but we know it is about sports gambling.  

As for harming animals, footballs, we learned on Wikipedia, are made from pig skin. The thought of all those skinless hogs running around somewhere just makes our blood boil. There must be some pretty cold cows out there, too, because baseball gloves and balls are made from cowhide. We’re told that every time a baseball touches the ground, it gets replaced. That’s a lot of baseballs and although cows are pretty big that must be a lot of harmed cows.  

The idleness and violence go hand-in-hand with drinking and gambling. How many trillions of dollars are wasted each year as people watch some guys pat each other’s butts and smash poor balls, or each other? Again, nobody is tracking these things but it is obvious that it is a giant waste.   

It is equally obvious that professional sports are bad for the environment. We can’t find it right now, but we once saw a study that claimed that up to half of global warming is caused by lacrosse alone. 

 If people worked instead of wasting their precious time on professional sports, America could easily afford to pay reparations to BIPOCs and other oppressed groups du jour. The athletes themselves would have to get real jobs too, thus providing even more support for the economy. And taxpayers could stop subsidizing sports stadiums and increase subsidies for worthy things, like NPR and carbon pipelines. 

Banning professional sports might sound unconstitutional. Didn’t the government have to pass an amendment before it banned alcohol? Yes! I’m an expert because I have read the Constitution all the way through, except for the boring and confusing parts, almost three times.  One approach would be to convinces states to ban sports. Start easy, like the Dakotas, which don’t have any sports, except maybe for rodeos. 

Then California because while policymakers there like drug use, they don’t like carbon emissions and need money to pay reparations. The leagues will then lose a lot of their teams and won’t be able to afford to defend themselves in other state legislatures.  Then the federal government could step in under the interstate commerce clause. I couldn’t actually find an amendment saying this, but I have it on good authority that the greatest president of all time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, packed the Supreme Court full of the greatest justices of all time and they all agreed that the Constitution doesn’t mean what it says, it means what they say it means, and they said it means the federal government can do whatever the heck it wants if it affects the economy in any way. If you don’t believe me, ask Farmer Filburn.  

There is an amendment that bothers us, though, the Ninth. It seems to say that people have a bunch of other rights not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and, taken with the Preamble, suggests that the government ought to leave people to do what they want for the most part. Hardly anyone ever mentions that amendment, though, so we’re guessing it was really about slavery.  

In sum, we don’t like sports though we know nothing about them but we feel that they are bad and are willing to concoct evidence and twist reality to convince a slim majority of our fellow Americans to join us in banning them.  

Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and a part time satirist who loves sports and also firearms, which are explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution yet under assault in Massachusetts.