Mike Celizic

I wouldn’t have thought that news that a football player took a legal drug prescribed by a doctor would be headline news, but when Terry Bradshaw said that’s how he came to take steroids back in the 1970s, that’s what happened.

The story has hung around for days. Bradshaw admits taking steroids! Bradshaw clarifies statement! Sun rises in the east! Film at 11!

The report said nothing at all about Bradshaw, but a lot about us. After all, he’s not the guy who was expressing shock or outrage. All he was doing was saying that 30 years ago, before steroids had been outlawed by either the government or the NFL, before most fans even knew they existed, doctors used to prescribe them to help players heal from injuries.

It should have been as shocking as discovering that there’s gambling at Rick’s Café. After all, last year the Patriots’ Rodney Harrison was suspended after he admitted taking human growth hormone. And a year earlier, Shawne Merriman had to sit out four games for testing positive for steroids. I don’t remember reading that anyone was either shocked or outraged. Most fans only wanted to know when they’d be back and whether they could still vote for the Harrison and Merriman for the Pro Bowl.

We have a problem, and I’m not talking about the tendency of athletes to cheat in any way possible. That goes back to the beginning of time. I’m talking about ourselves and our reaction to the cheaters.

You can’t deal with a problem if you don’t have a consistent way of thinking about it. You can’t be shocked that Bradshaw took drugs prescribed by a physician and not care what Merriman or Harrison took to be suspended. You can’t want to ban Barry Bonds from the Hall of Fame and not care how many metric tons of amphetamines Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays and most other players wolfed down to fight off hangovers and lack of sleep, jet lag and just plain physical fatigue.

If drugs are bad, they’re equally bad no matter where in the broad spectrum of sports they’re used.

Special feature Summer's NFL promises, concerns Tom Curran and Gregg Rosenthal break down the good, the bad and the future of all 32 teams. NBCSports.com

But we view different sports in different ways. In baseball, steroid users are treated like child molesters — shunned and ostracized and all but forced to register as steroid offenders. In the NFL, steroids — unless legally prescribed by a doctor to a famous quarterback 30 years ago — are a big yawn. On the other hand, Ricky Williams is evil incarnate because he smoked a few joints, an offense that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the NBA.

And in horse racing, nobody seems to care. Big Brown's trainer Rick Dutrow gets caught doping a horse — he’s appealing the suspension — and he gets 15 days? That’s all? If he were doing that to people, he’d be in prison. Why are four-legged athletes different from the two-legged variety? Shouldn’t we care about all carbon-based life forms entered in popular competition?

Don’t even get me started on professional wrestling, where drug abuse doesn’t merit so much as a yawn.

This goes way beyond the individual sports, and the camera hogs in Congress who keep dragging baseball players in for the purpose of embarrassing them in public should be the first to understand that. Either performance enhancers are bad everywhere or they’re not. You can’t pick and choose.

The problem is that our attitudes about steroids pretty much match our attitudes towards life. We like to think we have absolute moral standards, but while we think in absolutes, we live on a sliding scale of relativity. We tell our kids that stealing is always wrong, then, when they ask for a pen to do their homework, we give them one we swiped from the office supply cabinet. Or we come home bragging about how we gave the clerk a 10 and got change for a 20, and in neither case do we even recognize that what we’re doing is taking things that don’t belong to us — stealing.

Slide show   Week in Sports Pictures   Pain on the skating rink, flying high on the hardwood, upsets on the football field, and more. more photos

Our moral leaders preach celibacy, abstinence, monogamy, heterosexuality and keep getting caught doing all the things they tell us not to do.

And lawmakers attack waste in bills that have billions of dollars of earmarks attached.

I’m not saying everybody’s like this. They’re not. There are a lot of good cops, many moral leaders who actually try to practice what they preach and maybe even an honest Congressperson. But you take society as a whole, and it’s riddled with these kinds of moral contradictions.

Should we then be surprised that we can’t come to a common ground on drugs in spots?

Probably not.

Just the same, can't we at least lay off Terry Bradshaw?

MORE FROM NFL

NFL Section Front

Steelers’ playoff future slipping away Chiefs pull off K.C. masterpiece, stun Steelers Bengals botch chances, lead in loss to Raiders Eagles shake off close losses, edge Bears Pats stifle Jets, take 2-game lead in AFC East   Video: Patriots make a statement Saints move to 10-0, but ‘haven’t peaked yet’ Colts survive vs. Ravens by a ‘small margin’ Chargers rout Broncos, move atop AFC West Giants boot Falcons in OT, stop 4-game slide NFL Section Front   Add NFL headlines to your news reader: