I’ve never heard of this Colin Kaepernick guy before today, but apparently people are mad at him because he used his Constitutional right to protest our National Anthem by not standing for it when it was played.
Of course, he’s now being attacked left and right (okay, mostly right) by people who think he should be punished for not standing up for the Anthem that represents the country that allows people to not be punished for not standing up for the Anthem. Funny, that.
And all of the attacks on him go after him as the messenger of something that they don’t like. Why? Because they can’t attack the message itself, which is this: The National Anthem supports slavery.
Seriously. You don’t hear it in the first verse that everyone knows, but later on the lyrics say this:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
What’s that about? Simple. The British were attacking us in 1812 and they promised to free the slaves when they won. They accepted escaped slaves, who fought with the British. Francis Scott Key was proud of the fact that the Americans were able to stop this, putting into the lyrics that we should feel patriotic that the slaves met “the gloom of the grave” for daring to rebel against the United States.
After the war, the US demanded the return of the escaped slaves who lived, but the British refused. So there’s at least that.
But yeah, I can see why someone would say that we shouldn’t have a National Anthem that glorifies war and slavery.
And protesting is more patriotic than blindly accepting something wrong any day.
ventrellaquest.com 
I believe that 99.995% of people know of the Star Spangle Banner did not know it had more than one stanza and that in one of them slavery is mentioned. I would even put up the $114 million dollar salary Colin is getting playing the game that the country he’s protesting against loves so much that he didn’t. The fact he never mentioned it in his original replies or the fact that until now, I have never heard a peep about this being in the anthem leads a bit of credence to my thoughts.
And the song is referring, as stated, to the Colonial Marines, a group comprised of people who knew the country’s infrastructure better than that of those who were invading and were still stopped cold. I don’t feel it supports slavery, just that it denotes who else besides the British tried to repress our new nation.
Personally, I have no compunction to have that section removed and I also believe that Colin had a right to sit through it in protest, or for others to do so because they don’t feel like getting up. But to feel that this before unknown to the vast majority of people stanza in any way led to part of his protest IMO is stretching things. Of course we know about America’s past. Heck, ask any Native American if our country didn’t literally grow in the blood of people of color. But I have zero doubt that Kaepernick knew about the second stanza of the anthem and therefore had any influence upon his decision not to stand for the anthem.
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