A group of National Football League players’ mothers has asked President Donald Trump to “put a stop to the divisive language.”
The Professional Football Players Mothers Association penned an open letter to the president in response to his repeated attacks on the players who’ve protested police brutality and racial injustice by taking a knee during the national anthem.
Trump sparked outrage last week when he asked a crowd in Huntsville, Alabama, if they’d “love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired’?”
He’s been doubling down on those comments in the days since.
“(We) believe in promoting a positive image of professional football players as athletes and young men of character,” the mothers’ association wrote in the missive, which BuzzFeed shared online Thursday.
“It saddens the organization to know that President Donald Trump would make our sons — as well as their mothers — the target of inflammatory, offensive comments that are intended to promote anger and hatred, depleting them of their heritage and self-identity.”
The group commended everyone who had stood with their sons “to affect change in America,” and said its members would “continue to model that behavior no matter what others may say.”
The letter, signed by the association’s president Michele Green (the mother of former Miami Dolphins offensive tackle Bryant McKinnie), ended with a Bible quote: “Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble.”
“We know our self-worth as mothers,” Green said to BuzzFeed. “We’re not what he said we were.”