I think that Mike Lupica of the Daily News should be fired for using human growth hormone.

Do I have any proof that he’s used the stuff? No, I have to admit that I don’t. Do I have any particular reason to think the News is legally able to fire sportswriters because they use hGH? No, I again have to admit that I don’t. Still, Lupica doesn’t have any more proof that Angels outfielder Gary Matthews Jr. has used hGH than I do that Lupica has. Nor does he have any more reason to think that the Angels can void Matthews’s contract than I have to think that the Daily News can void his. Despite this, he felt free to wax ludicrous in yesterday’s paper over how Angels owner Arte Moreno is being deprived of his rights because he can’t fire Matthews, who was recently alleged to have ordered hGH over the Internet in a Sports Illustrated article.

Turnabout is fair play.

“How come Matthews has more rights than the owner here?” Lupica groaned, mourning the injustice of a legally binding contract to which both Matthews and the Angels agreed freely. “Why can’t Arte Moreno do what bosses in the real world do, and fire somebody for drugs?”

Why can’t he?

Assuming this isn’t meant rhetorically, the answer is that Matthews is protected from being fired capriciously over the fact that his name has come up in a drugtrafficking investigation because he’s represented by a union. Additionally, the Angels, like all baseball teams, are protected from having to employ ballplayers who enjoy this right by their own rights to not sign them and to buy out their contracts. If the unproven allegations against Matthews are so intolerable to the Angels, after all, they’re perfectly free to cut him a check for the $50 million he’s due and send him packing.

Period.

Lupica, like all people who think that the rights others have fairly negotiated are valid only so long as they don’t irritate them (a shocking number of these people write about baseball for a living), is a soft target. The problem is that people who think like this aren’t all seen foaming in the newspapers and heard raving on drive-time sports radio; some of them are wandering the halls of Congress. Early last month, Reps. Bobby Rush, a Democrat of Illinois, and Cliff Stearns, a Republican of Florida, wrote a preposterous letter to Senator Mitchell, who’s heading a commission investigating baseball’s drug scandals, in which they expressed their pious desire for baseball to cooperate with his investigation, referencing legislation Stearns introduced in 2005 that would have federalized drug testing in pro sports and stating their hopes that “similar legislative initiatives will remain unnecessary.”

Hopes.

The barely concealed threat here is that if Major League Baseball and the players union don’t agree to whatever nonsense Senator Mitchell deems fit, the Congress will make them do so. This comes back to Matthews because the World Anti-Doping Agency has been threatening of late to release by the end of this year a portable kit that will allow for quick, cheap blood testing for hGH. The science here is rotten. Hundreds of athletes were blood- tested at the 2004 Olympics for hGH, and all of them passed. Still worse, the current hGH test only works (when it does) for 24 to 36 hours after the stuff has been injected. Additionally, the Joint Drug Agreement between baseball management and the union doesn’t permit for blood testing. In short, owners have no way to enforce testing, and players have no reason to submit to it.

No reason.

Unless, that is, the assembled bluenoses of the world — an army of guys like Mike Lupica, Bobby Rush, and Dick Pound, the selfpromoting WADA head whose solution to every problem is drug testing administered by, of course, WADA — are able to use the collective force of their self-righteousness to strong-arm the players into surrendering more of their hard-won rights, such as the right not to have to submit to unannounced blood-taking in service of a drug test that doesn’t work.

Doesn’t work.

We live, as our bluenoses are ever so quick to remind us, in a society of laws. Among the most fundamental of those, right up there with freedom of speech and freedom from arbitrary detention, is the right to define our legal relationships with others within the broader context of civil and criminal law. It is illegal to buy hGH without a prescription, and if Matthews did so and gets prosecuted for it, there’s no reason to cry a single tear for him. That being said, the Angels don’t have the right to fire him over it (certainly not because he’s simply been accused of it in a magazine article), and that’s a good thing. If owners want that right, they can try and negotiate for it at the bargaining table. If they can’t get the players to agree, that’s too bad.

End of story.

What will be too bad for all of us is Congress passing, or even threatening to pass, an authoritarian law that seizes bodily fluids and surrenders them to the mercies of Dick Pound just because they happen to belong to famous and rich people. That’s wrong. Get as mad at Gary Matthews Jr. as you’d like, but don’t look past the real issue here, which is a threat to liberty marching behind the twin flags of moralism and class envy. If we can overlook that because of something as silly as our dismay at the fact that we can’t vicariously punish athletes for being what we wish we were, we deserve to live in a prison state.

tmarchman@nysun.com