A coalition of more than 400 religious leaders and others from around the nation have called on the National Football League to change the planned location of next year’s Super Bowl from Arizona because of the state’s series of “racist” “voter suppression” laws.
Coalition members, including Dr. Cornel West and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have also called for a meeting with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
In a letter late last month to Goodell, the coalition targeted three new restrictive Arizona laws that purge voter lists and increase signature and absentee voting requirements. These exacerbate earlier discriminatory laws, they noted.
The push is part of “The Ballot or The Blackout” campaign to pressure Arizona to guarantee ballot rights for everyone. The campaign went into high gear after federal lawmakers failed to pass a national law protecting voting rights.
“We are closer than ever to midnight for our democracy because Congress refuses to protect the right to vote,” said the Rev. Stephen Green of the St. Luke AME Church in Harlem.
“We all would love for Arizona to see that kind of revenue, to bring that many people here to invest in our state. But I think there are times where you can’t remain silent, and this is the time where money has to not supersede morality,” the Rev. Dontá McGilvery, Pastor of Outreach and Justice at First Institutional Baptist Church in Phoenix, told local ABC affiliate Channel 15 earlier this week.
“We have to show that money cannot be more important than people. And right now, the most important thing is voting rights and how our government is restricting that.”
Nearly 30 years ago, the NFL moved the Super Bowl out of Arizona to Pasadena, California, because voters refused to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday, the religious leaders pointed out.
“Are we called to be merely spectators of a sport we love — or are we called to act, as the NFL did the last time it stood up to Arizona?” the letter asked.
“As two of the NFL’s slogans this season are ‘Inspire Change’ and ‘It Takes All of Us,’ who precisely are the us to be inspired, but the very spectators who also happen to be voters?”
The letter concluded with an appeal to Goodell to “make living words of ‘Inspire Change,’” and find a new location for next year’s Super Bowl.
Goodell has yet to respond.
A spokesperson for Arizona’s Republican Gov. Doug Ducey called the demand to move the Super Bowl out of the state “beyond belief.”