The National Football League has officially put the State of Texas on notice: if that state persists in denying men with peculiar sexual proclivities access to public rooms full of young girls with their pants down, then Texas may be denied the privilege of hosting any more Super Bowls.

To be precise, as you probably know, Texas lawmakers are proposing a law similar to North Carolina's, restricting access to public bathrooms and changing rooms to people of the actual biological sex for which those facilities were designed. In response to this brazen challenge to the progressive denial of common sense, the NFL has issued a statement, as described by CBS News:

The NFL sharpened its warning to Texas on Friday about a "bathroom bill" targeting transgender people, suggesting for the first time that the football-crazed state could miss out on hosting another Super Bowl if the proposal is enacted.

"If a proposal that is discriminatory or inconsistent with our values were to become law there, that would certainly be a factor considered when thinking about awarding future events," league spokesman Brian McCarthy said in response to an email question about the Texas bill.

So Texas is "targeting" (very objective reporting!) transgender people by suggesting that only biological females should use bathrooms designed for biological females. Why is this controversial? Because it is "inconsistent with [the NFL's] values." Really? And when was this great table of NFL values etched in stone? Would the NFL have taken up this issue as a matter of principle at any time prior to, say, five years ago? A decade or two ago, the idea of the NFL as a public defender of transgenderism -- insofar as anyone would have known what that was -- would have been the premise of a comedy sketch. Furthermore, no mainstream comedy troupe would have hesitated to perform that sketch, whereas today, of course, the concept would violate "SNL values," or whatever.

That is to say, the NFL itself, if looked at over a ten-year period, is inconsistent with "NFL values." These supposed values, in other words, are no deeply held moral position; they are nothing but another corporate entity's kowtowing obeisance to the radical progressive zeitgeist. Transgenderism in general, and transgender bathroom access in particular, are (ersatz) issues that were on almost no American's radar just a few years ago, but which are now suddenly, supposedly, so clear cut and unambiguous that anyone who has not immediately embraced the one and only correct side of the issue deserves public shaming, boycotting, punishment.

A notion we laughed at when the very liberal Monty Python troupe joked about it in 1979 is now an absolute truth -- an unquestionable "value" -- the denial of which warrants a public stoning. And no less than the most popular sports organization in America, the NFL (Nothing but Frilly Lingerie?) has joined the battle as a defender of the "right" of men who wear dresses to use the same bathroom as your daughter.

Yes, that's right, football -- the domain of manly violence, steroid-enraged tough guys, O.J. Simpson, and the most gruesomely infamous case of sports-related serial pedophilia in our time -- has taken to dictating sexual ethics to the citizens of America. Do the sport's kingpins suspect they have a few more skeletons in their closet, and hope to get ahead of the curve by normalizing men invading girls' bathrooms before it becomes another awkward scandal for them?

In any case, my real question about all of this holier than thou humanism from the NFL is this: How many Americans are prepared to give up watching football in order to take a stand against corporate bullying?

For years, various institutions of mainstream America have actively contributed to the progressive avalanche burying conservatives, religious people, and in general all those obsolete men and women collectively dubbed "traditional Americans." From the corporate world to Hollywood (i.e., the corporate world in designer gowns), and from the educational establishment to the music industry (i.e., the corporate world with no clothes), ordinary decency, piety, privacy, and self-reliance are continually under threat of moral condemnation and social shunning.

From Google and Facebook to the NBA and the NCAA, prominent fixtures of everyday American life have declared themselves opposed on principle to any tenet from the Bible that cannot be recast in secular, neo-Marxist terms; to any use of language not approved by the Frankfurt School descendants who regulate public education and public discourse; to any attitude about race or sex that falls short of the very latest leftist consensus on historical revisionism and affirmative action (what is "affirmed" by the act of societal self-flagellation, by the way?); and to any attempt to preserve a common sense view of human nature against the onslaught of politically correct doublethink that is intended, both in high-flown theory and in thuggish practice, to wipe common sense and nature off the face of the Earth forever.

Conservatives tend to get all riled up about these outrages within their own echo chamber, but many do next to nothing to combat them in practice. "After all," they tell each other by way of mutual support, "what are we supposed to do? Give up watching sports?"

Imagine that: Giving up a transient pleasure for the sake of a principle -- who woulda thunk it!

Remember, this is not a simple case of political disagreement, where boycotting one's rival might seem tantamount to condemning pluralism per se. No one is suggesting you stop visiting your sister's house for Thanksgiving because she votes Democrat, or even that you stop eating at your favorite fast food restaurant because its CEO supported Hillary Clinton. We are not talking about simple disagreement, but rather a concerted effort to silence you, to exclude you from normal society until you agree to conform, and ultimately to delete you and your unacceptable views from the social and intellectual landscape altogether. It is the progressives, such as the NFL, who are refusing to break bread with those who disagree with them.

Your country's noblest traditions and philosophical foundations are being eroded by what amounts to an organized national defamation campaign. You are being publicly branded an immoral holdout from a reactionary past, a racist, sexist, phobic obstacle to equal rights and human dignity. The NFL, an entertainment group which exists entirely at the mercy of your patronage, has officially designated you an enemy of freedom and tolerance -- "tolerance" being today's euphemism for progressivism's absolute intolerance of the West's moral, religious, and political traditions. So sure are these corporate entertainment moguls that you need them more than they need you that they have no reservation about insulting you to your face by threatening your elected representatives with reprisals, effectively taunting you: "What are you going to do about it?"

If it isn't high time for American conservatives, constitutionalists, patriots, to forego a pleasure for the sake of a principle, then I don't know when that time would be. This is a simple test of the resolve of people who claim they "want their country back." Saying, "I won't watch another Meryl Streep or Ashley Judd movie" is no great stand for people who might never have seen one in the first place, and certainly wouldn't lose anything by so depriving themselves. Giving up football might actually hurt a little for a lot of American conservatives, including many Texans -- but doesn't giving up freedom hurt a lot more?

The NFL is using its presumed social indispensability as leverage to twist the arm of a state's politicians to comply with its "values," i.e., with the politically correct agenda to which the league has sold itself, probably in exchange for being left alone by the progressive establishment that has long demonized football for its "war-like" nature. The surest way to shut them up is to shut them down -- turn off the TV, stop buying tickets, tell them where they can stick their Super Bowl.

If "traditional Americans" can't give up football -- mere entertainment -- as a more-than-symbolic stand in defense of their liberty, their moral traditions, and their daughters' safety, then how can they be expected to show the fortitude required to win the multigenerational culture war that looms?

The signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, fortunes, and honor to one another and to their cause, risking far more than their immediate pleasures in search of their dream of a free republic. Now, many of the most prominent beneficiaries of their courage, and the courage of many subsequent generations of warriors, have banded together in a brotherhood of decline, vowing to undermine the family, civility, and private conscience -- necessary conditions for the survival of the republic as conceived -- in favor of a dream of the void: "progress" into a moral and intellectual dissipation that serves only the interests of an entrenched establishment, such establishments always benefiting most from a population drained of higher purpose and spiritual strength.

The NFL, at this moment, is serving as the progressive death cult's canary in the coal mine. If a year without football proves to be a higher price than Texans, and all Americans, are willing to pay for the sake of their children, their reason, and their right to say "two plus two equals four," with or without the Super Bowl, then what hope is left for a nation that, more than any other, rises or falls on the character of its private citizens?

Visit darenjonescu.com for more on this and related issues, and to read the author's book, The Case Against Public Education.