newbie's post reinforces what I have thought about Vick's situation (the whole thing, not just his reinstatement to football) all along ... that one's personal view of what he did is largely determined by one's own value system.
That's an obvious statement we all understand intellectually, but not sure we all really understand emotionally.
Personally, I find dog fighting abhorent. I ache for the animals, feel rage at the humans who perpetrate it and confusion over how they seem to lack the empathy gene.
I find the way women are treated in much of the world abhorent. The thought process behind treating any fellow human being as property is incomprehensible to me.
I find it incomprehensible that children are abandoned, beaten, abused, ignored. I did so before I had kids myself ... as now a father it's an issue I cannot even think about without getting knots in my gut.
I feel these things, in large part, because I was raised in an environment where they were viewed as wrong.
But I also do things I know others find abhorent. I eat meat. I don't subscribe to any of man's religions. I don't care a whit about any else's sexual orientation.
I don't find those things abhorent, in large part, because I was raised in an environment where they were considered normal.
Mike Vick was raised in an environment where dog fighting is, by many, viewed as normal. Does that mean he had no choice but to find it normal? No. But it is a factor--one I think is unfair and unrealistic to dismiss out of hand.
As to what happens next ...
None of us will ever know what if anything has changed in Mike Vick's heart. It's possible he's a changed man and his experience has made him view dog fighting and any other form of animal cruelty differently. It's also possible he's the exact same guy he was before he got arrested, and the only thing that's changed is he'll be a hell of a lot more careful about shows in public.
The truth, I suspect, is somewhere in between. It almost always is.
Should be he allowed to make a living? Of course. To suggest otherwise flies in the face of the entire legal system we live by---you pay your debt to society as the laws of the day dictate, and then are given the right to get on with your life.
Should the NFL be forced into the role of social conscience or arbiter? I don't think so--not unless we're going to live in a country where some solomonic regulatory agency is going to dictate to any business who it can and cannot hire based on whatever crimes they have already been punished for in the legal system.
Me, I don't want to live in that country, but that's another discussion.
Bottom line ... I do not and will not pretend to know what's in Vick's heart. I think he should be able to play in the NFL. I think the Eagles would be totally justified in demanding in return for hiring him that he be socially active, and use his celebrity to try to bring the realities of dog fighting into the light and hopefully have some small effect on bringing it to an end.
There will always be people who take pleasure in blood sports, activities that take advantage of those--human and otherwise--who cannot say no. We all know that. But "the rest of us" (admittedly superimposing our own value systems) can do our best to try to reduce their numbers ... and I think Mike Vick can serve a useful role in that regard, particularly given the stage and platform of the NFL.
Whether his heart is in it or not.