Clippers Owner Donald Sterling Banned for Life from Staples Center

[TheHuckster]

Link

From what Kareem Abdul Jabbar says, this guy should have been called out on his crap a long time before someone taped a conversation of him making racist statements. If he lost a lawsuit claiming he discriminated against minorities and said "black tenants smell and attract vermin" then how on earth did the NAACP even consider giving him a lifetime achievement award?

[TimmyHate]

I've been having a debate on Twitter this morning, with people arguing what he said is free speech and therefore the league cannot ban him,

IANAL but the 1st amendment only protects free speech from government interfearance. If I start spewing racist, homophobic crap on here, Raps and the crew would ban my ass before I could even finish my sentance. And I have NO ability to hid behind the 1st amendment.

[Kheldarson]

Xkcd has a good explanation, if you want to use it: http://xkcd.com/1357/

[Greenday]

I've been having a debate on Twitter this morning, with people arguing what he said is free speech and therefore the league cannot ban him

Free speech does not mean free from all repercussions.

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

My guess is, somewhere buried in that ownership contract is a citizenship clause that the league can use to force the sale because of perceived damage to the league (how that doesn't get used more often to depose owners that squander the resources of a team and create apathy in their home market, I'll never know.)

If that doesn't exist though, I don't see legally how this can happen. Since most commissioners are lawyers, I'm guessing that's what this is though.

I will say Re: "does not mean free from all reprecussions" /xkcd, etc. there's a reason the ACLU frequently ends up involved defending bigots. People tend to feel very self righteous when it comes to punishing them and they overstep the law constantly. Regardless of what good "feels" people get about the "justice" of it, it doesn't suddenly make torts legal. And one of the things we do tend to see in this outrage culture of ours, is blogs and people playing fast and loose with the facts en masse and so I suspect the legal problem we see with the internet that was not as big a problem before it is proving which person partially lying about you (either libel or slander) actually caused you damage. Did Jezebel cause you loss of business? The NY Post? Bob who never gets out of his underwear on weekdays? If you can't prove your damage was caused by one of them, you can't succeed in a suit with any of them.

Doesn't apply to Mr. Caught On Tape here, but it does make me want people to tap the breaks a little every time. It always wants makes me want to bust out Federalist No. 51(I won't, it's too long). TL;Dr: "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. "

I think the reason you see the governmental prohibition in the Bill of Rights is because a legislature couldn't just walk over it when their impulse would be to. They expected the people (who run the legislatures) to be wise enough (at the time they wrote it, they were racist, sexist, AND classist) to mix in passing laws to protect people from retaliation or otherwise keep the peace between citizens. They didn't anticipate total sufferage, unbelievable voting power from the uneducated, or project that 200 years away from revolution people would largely be over the idea of fealty to the democratic experiment to the point of almost complete apathy by most groups thereby ensuring that the most active were generally the most pissed off. There's a reason retaliation laws are unbelievably narrow and only protect few types of speech. Most people don't want to lose the right to be vindictive.

[TheHuckster]

I think to add to your point, Yeti, that I do fear a future where people are constantly looking for things to get offended by, regardless of the other person's intentions. If I have to feel like I'm walking on eggshells because I made a comment aside to a close friend in private quarters that got overheard by someone who took it out of context, it's not good for anyone involved.

Racism is bad, as is sexism and other forms of hate. However, while we should act upon cases of bigotry, we shouldn't invoke mob mentality, witchhunting, or extreme crusading to the point where it amounts to thought policing and invasion of privacy. Those things can be just as detrimental to society when invoked by the people as when invoked by the government.

I have a hard time with cases like this where a conversation that is assumed to be private has been exposed to the world. Even if it led to that person's justified demise, I still have concerns as to how this sort of vindictive mentality could result in other cases where someone was either misunderstood, was taken out of context, or might even have been doctored or spinned by a biased entity to make it sound a lot worse than it really was. It becomes a game of telephone followed by mob justice based on false premises. It already happens even when people do make public statements, it can be worse if it happens when they do it to private statements because more often than not, only that one person has access to what was said, and you have to trust that they are not being dishonest or purposely taking things out of context to crucify the individual. At least with public statements, people can point out the bigger picture and retort the biased statement.

And, again, in this case, it shouldn't have even come to this. Why did a private phone conversation made public cause this frenzy when he had previously made statements that were even stated in public court documents which went unanswered?