IT MUST be a tiring business, constantly looking for new ways of being offended. The Calcutta Cup match on Saturday, which all sane people will have found excellent in every possible way, didn’t seem to give much scope for it, but the relentless social justice warriors of social media managed to find one when, before kick-off, some (though not all) England players knelt, and only a few of the Scottish team did.

This sort of thing now requires Scottish Rugby to issue a statement saying it condemns racism, but that it’s up to individual players to make their own decisions about how they mark that stance. It turns out, in the most plausible account of events, that it’s not even as thought-through as that.

Rugby now makes, as football does, an announcement about its opposition to racism in (to use the formulation Jeremy Corbyn employed when playing down his followers’ anti-Semitic outbursts) “all its forms”. This is, or should be, entirely uncontentious, except to the degree that it would be even better if you never had to bring the subject up, because it never occurred to anyone to be racist.

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Players were neither expected nor encouraged to go down on one knee during the announcement and minute’s silence before last November’s games and, indeed, none of the French, Welsh, Irish or Italian squad members did in the other Six Nations matches over the weekend. But at Twickenham, some English players did. Of the Scottish players who noticed this – most seem not to have been in their line of sight and never knew anything about it at all – some followed suit. Far from being evidence of institutional racism in rugby, it just seems to be something that no one had thought about one way or the other.

What’s slightly bizarre is that this was originally a highly individual gesture of protest, and it is now being implied that anyone who refuses to adopt it must be ill-intended. Colin Kaeperinck, formerly a quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers, had taken to kneeling during the national anthem as a protest against police racism and brutality in the United States. At the time it struck me, and I think quite a lot of people, as a dignified and highly effective way of making a point, like the raised fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics.

Whether you subscribed entirely to Mr Kaepernick’s view of things or not wasn’t the issue. Anyone who denies that some parts of America have a serious problem with racism and brutality in policing is being so wilfully obtuse that it seems quite reasonable to say that, whether they’re actively racist or not, they’re not paying enough attention to the matter. The same is true of people who instinctively object to the slogan “Black Lives Matter” by replying “All Lives Matter”. Of course they do, but it’s young black men in America who are 2.5 times more likely to be shot by the police than their white counterparts.

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America, where children pledge allegiance to the flag at school, has always been a bit weird about this sort of thing. More than 30 years ago, I frequently debated there on what was then a hot topic: whether burning the US flag should be outlawed. It was very difficult to persuade people that, if the flag stood for anything, it ought to be the freedom to burn it; and that saying so didn’t mean that you were necessarily subscribing to any of the beliefs that might be held by people who actually did want to burn it.

You may differ from Mr Kaepernick’s view that the US flag is an obvious symbol of slavery without being pro-slavery. Similarly, endorsing all elements of the Black Lives Matter movement, as opposed to the slogan, is not compulsory to provide evidence that you’re not a white supremacist.

Mr Kaepernick is entitled to his views, and you are entitled to differ from them, or some of them, without it automatically making you a member of the Ku Klux Klan. (As it happens, a point that rather bolsters his claims of racism in American sport is the fact that no team has been prepared to sign him since the row about all this blew up.)

But if anything runs counter to the spirit of his admirable bravery in taking a stand, by choosing to stand out, it must surely be the idea that, if you don’t now do the same thing, you are on the side of discrimination.

If they tried hard, most reasonable people could probably imagine circumstances in which one could deplore racism, but happen not to share every single aspect of Mr Kaepernick’s political worldview. If they tried harder, they could probably even imagine thinking that such people were wrong, but not necessarily evil. Or right, but for the wrong reasons. Or any of the umpteen ways in which people differ, without being malign.

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Some of this is beginning to reek of the Maoist or Stalinist show trials, in which those who differed from the correct stance were paraded with signs round their necks declaring their heresy.

Before Saturday’s match, alongside the anti-racist announcement, there was a round of applause for the late Captain Sir Tom Moore. Even though he was deplorably white, most people will approve that, and his heroic fundraising efforts. But I began to wonder whether things were not going a little over the top when I saw the evening news a few days earlier, with a piece about railway staff who had been lined up in order to clap the arrival in the station of a train named after Sir Tom.

We should be free to cheer Sir Tom, or clap the NHS. Or refuse to. To boycott the national anthem, take the knee rather than stand, or give the Black Power salute. Or refuse to. Free to judge those who do any of those things as misguided or ill-mannered, or celebrate them as speaking truth to power. The only thing that absolutely undermines any of those positions is when the behaviour becomes compulsory.

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