The United Church of Christ usually has other business on Sundays, but they’re using their massive membership to try to get involved in the NFL.
According to John Woodrow Cox of the Washington Post, the nearly 1 million-member church is asking its members to boycott Washington’s franchise because of the nickname that many find offensive.
The Rev. Linda Jaramillo, a national officer of the church, said the name “is offensive and causes direct harmful effects to the public health and well-being of the Native American population.”
The UCC is far from the first to take that stance, but their support was noted in a joint release from the National Congress of American Indians and the Oneida Indian Nation, which has led the effort for a change.
“We applaud the United Church of Christ for taking a bold stance against the use of this demeaning and damaging racial epithet,” the statement read. “With its vote, the UCC is demonstrating that organizations and individuals can make conscious choices to demonstrate compassion and respect for their fellow man by working to eliminate this offensive, dictionary-defined slur from our nation’s vernacular.
“As religious leaders from diverse backgrounds all across America continue to speak out about the need to change this derogatory term, Washington team owner Dan Snyder should face the facts and stop clinging to this deeply offensive name. Profiting from the slurring of people of color is a choice that he is making, but we remain hopeful that he will in time come to recognize that changing the mascot is an important moral and civil rights issue that is not going away.”
Of course, Snyder has refused all such suggestions in the past, and will likely continue to until it becomes more attractive to him (financially) to do so.
But hey, as long as they’re “winning off the field,” no one really minds, or notices that they’re not winning on the field, right?