“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.”

-Ronald Reagan

Imagine with me: you are the profoundly wealthy CEO of a family entertainment corporation that operates in a city that has suffered a number of serious tragedies in the past decades and whose beleaguered citizens nonetheless support your company with tremendous loyalty.

One day you are contacted by the recently bankrupted local branch of a global corporation that has run afoul of any number of very serious laws that protect against the most serious crimes. They are asking if you wouldn’t be so kind as to help them revamp their image, given how beloved and respected your company is.

One would hope that you’d do some very minimal research to determine the severity of the crimes involving this hat-in-hand corporation and whether your morals and ethics would allow your consorting with such criminals before you considered engaging any further. A simple google search would do.

Now imagine that you discovered that the crimes that eventually bankrupted these beggarly little bastards were many multiple instances of child rape and the organization’s systemic and wide-ranging efforts to protect, not punish, the perpetrating employees. Employees who, I will repeat, raped children.

How fast would you hang up? How mortified would you be to even have had such a grotesque conversation? How deep would it chill your bones to feel so near the hubris and wickedness, the pure evil, of such people?

Apparently New Orleans Saints owner Gayle Benson, members of the New Orleans Saints corporate staff, and members of the New Orleans Pelicans corporate staff don’t share your ethical or moral values. When presented with something akin — and very possibly worse — to this conjectural, they summoned the lawyers and the masters of the public relations dark arts and got right to work. To date neither the Pelicans nor the Saints have offered anything, not one credible statement or even a single piece of counter evidence, to remove from them the unpardonable disgrace of being the voluntary clean up crew for the most vile of crimes. In contrast, what they have done is whine to the court about the (legal) release of evidence that implicates them as organizations and named individuals in — at the very minimum — the laundering of the reputations of this institutional scumfuckery. And, if the Saints own internal emails are to be believed, potentially aiding pedophilic rapists to be removed from the District Attorney’s matter of public record list of credibly accused clergy.

To wit, this shocking email from New Orleans Saints vice president of communications Greg Bensel to team president Dennis Lauscha about a chat he had with the then sitting District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro on the day the list of the credibly accused child rapists (cum shepherds of the Lord) came out. It says: “Had a (conference call) w Leon Cannizzaro last night that allowed us to take some people off the list.”

I don’t know what kind of person or organization (or District Attorney) engages in this kind of sick behavior but I take it as a point of pride that I don’t know any of them.

To be abundantly and unmistakably clear this is what many of the Saints (and Pelicans) upper level employees were helping to protect from public scrutiny and scorn: a still ongoing Louisiana state police investigation into the New Orleans archdiocese, in which law enforcement has clearly stated in sworn court documents that they had probable cause to believe the church ran a child sex trafficking ring for decades and subsequently engaged in a cover up of those crimes. Take a moment. Re-read that paragraph.

In response to this scandalous nightmare in which one of its corporate entities offered to help in the cover up of a generations long child rape and sex trafficking ring, the NFL, itself a deeply suspect multi-billion dollar industry, had — through its staggeringly stupid mouthpiece, Roger Goodell — the kind of response that should make you wretch and turn the channel to the Puppy Bowl:

“Mrs. Benson and the Saints are very involved in this community and they are great corporate citizens,” he said. Without any hint of irony. Or a whisper of shame.

How despicable. One can be fairly certain that at this point the community might wish Mrs Benson and the Saints were less involved — specifically as it pertains to the concealment of the names of “some” (denoting the plural) child rapists and sex traffickers from a concerned public who might want to keep their children safe from such unforgivable fiendishness. Even a dullard as prodigious as Mr Goodell can’t have missed that, surely?

Watch the Super Bowl, gather with your friends, enjoy the great traditions of the day; I certainly will. But please do remember that the NFL, like the institutional church, is a money-making venture that views you as nothing more than a consumer of its product, to be manipulated and pilfered of your time and money for their enrichment. Nothing shocking there. These afterall are the deals we make with entertainment outfits.

That we should have to demand that they do the very bare minimum of not engaging in the sexual exploitation of children or protection of those who do is only proof of how disengaged from reality, morality and decency our “corporate citizens” truly are. As we gather on Sunday perhaps that is worth a discussion.