maintain your cage, or simple dismissal? Australian fighter Robert Whittaker lands a kick on Brad Scott at a UFC event on the Gold Coast last year. Photo: Courtesy UFC Sports journalists are lovers, not fighters - it's an accepted fact - but occasionally a moral argument on the field of play prompts you to spit in the dirt, draw a line with your foot and say "bring it on." Usually you get chinned, but it's quite rare to get kicked in the head. So from the "careful what you wish for" files comes news of Friday's protest on the steps of state parliament by the "Mixed Martial Arts community" - their beef apparently being the outlawing in Victoria and Western Australia of fights in enclosed cages. Ultimately we need to judge all sports by whether they add or subtract from society. That's right, in a federal election frenzy - with asylum seekers apparently storming the borders and state governments from coast to coast getting hairy chested about law and order - apparently the type of padded cell in which kneeing, elbowing and beatings to floored opponents takes place is one of society's pressing political issues. Victorian mixed martial artist George Sotiropoulos trains at a UFC open workout in Sydney in 2011. In a media statement, Mixed Martial Arts Australian Fighting Championship general manager Sean Bridger argued that fighting in a ring is "dangerous" because there's more chance of falling through the ropes. He also claimed with a straight - if not bruised - face that as a legal sport the government must ensure a "safe working environment." Now he may well be right that flaying an opponent into submission is safer inside an octagon, but surely if we want a political debate on this form of entertainment it should be whether promoting it as a legitimate "sport" makes the rest of society safer. In a Sherlock Holmes moment, Bridger does concede that the cage ban is "mainly due to the public image that they feel [it] is barbaric." But I'd wager most neutrals are not as appalled by the cage as the nature of the contest inside it. This moral debate has been under the radar in Australia, but has long stirred passions in the United States where in the 1990s Senator John McCain famously labelled the then nascent UFC as "human cockfighting" and sought to have it banned. The exponential growth of the sport through the Pay TV and click-bait internet age, not to mention the money it brings to struggling fight venues and down-at-heel cities, ultimately saw the sport's promoters address some of the criticisms. After all, the purity of any professional sport will always come a distant second if there's a cheque to be cashed. This led to McCain conceding in 2007 that the sport had, to some extent, cleaned up its act. Still, despite this grudging change of heart from a presidential candidate, New York State legislators failed again last June to muster the numbers to have UFC bouts sanctioned. No Madison Square Gardens paydays just yet. Meanwhile, despite all the cash on offer those "cowardly" French still refuse to buckle on their nationwide ban. Local promoters should perhaps be grateful we've never let that debate out of the cage in Australia, but if they really want a bout in the political arena then there's a lot more to be discussed openly than just the configuration of the battle zone. For a start, notions of responsibility about the promotion of violence in sport by organisers and the media. Not to mention the cues we give our children in an age when the nightly news regularly delivers sermons on king-hits in city streets. Certainly the hoary arguments about whether MMA is comparable with boxing takes no account of the notion that at least under the Marquess of Queensberry when someone is down they are not up for further punishment. For even between consenting adults, contact sports cannot operate in a vacuum from society's norms, without expecting scrutiny and judgment. Boxing must face its mismatches and damaged lives, motor racing its environmental impact and cycling its drug culture. MMA and its supporters must face the fact that not everyone accepts that inoculating a generation of kids with the notion that violence is power and the aesthetics of a beating is good sport. All of which was eloquently summed up by a bloke called "karlos," who posted this gem in a forum on the opinion website theroar.com.au in 2011: "I admire the power, fitness, bravery and skill of these blokes, but I do see it as very raw violence which knob heads are going to use on the streets and in fact, already are." You want that political debate MMA? The mums and dads of Australia might yet spit in your cage and say bring it on.