When football season starts September 9, it will be with two national anthems — the “Star Spangled Banner” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The NFL hopes this will advance its political goals. We have a hard time, though, seeing the adoption of two national anthems, one for white America and one for black America, as a unifying démarche celebrating “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

It’s not our intention to disparage either song. “The Star Spangled Banner” was written by Francis Scott Key during the War of 1812, when our flag was illuminated by rockets over Fort McHenry. The poem that became “Lift Every Voice” was written in 1900, by James Weldon Johnson. Johnson went on to lead the NAACP and become a Republican activist, backing Theodore Roosevelt for president. His song became the informal civil rights anthem.

Neither do we intend to belittle the NFL’s aspirations to be a force for equality under law. Our football teams are generally privately-owned, for-profit companies, with their own First Amendment rights. If they want to use — or merely permit — their players to protest for the NFL’s, or their own, political causes, we don’t see where the rest of us have any business to tell them otherwise. It’s a free country.

To the degree, though, that the NFL aspires to be a force for inclusion and unity, it strikes us that the introduction of a second national anthem is a step backward. Are players going to stand for one anthem and kneel for the other? If there is something actually wrong with the lyrics of our national anthem, our instinct would be to change the words, rather than to sing two anthems at the same event.

As it happens, the third stanza of the Star Spangled Banner has a couplet — “No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave” — that is sometimes cited as offensive. But if it’s the whole anthem itself that offends, how is two anthems a solution? Congress could enact new lyrics. Or the League could simply have its anthem-singers skip the third verse.

That’s what Whitney Houston did when she sang what may be the most brilliant rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” ever sung — particularly when she hit that high note that coincides with the last word of the phrase “land of the free.” What is important is that we have a national song that unites us all behind the American idea — that “all men are created equal” that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .”

After the death of George Floyd, President George W. Bush issued a statement declaring that “America’s greatest challenge has long been to unite people of very different backgrounds into a single nation of justice and opportunity.” He suggested that we “have often underestimated how radical that quest really is.” Our own view is that it will be easier to pursue if we fight as one nation, not two — and all sing one national anthem.