Leftists hate dissent, and up until not too very long ago, had done a very good job at quashing it altogether. Before Elon Musk bought Twitter (that’s what we used to call X, kids) and the left’s stranglehold on the popular culture began loosening, those who publicly bucked the left’s agenda faced the very real prospect of personal and professional ruin. Refer to Caitlyn Jenner or Rachel Levine as “he,” and you’d get banned from social media, publicly shamed, and could even lose your job.
Today however, leftists are still trying to assert their hegemony over the rest of us, but they’re not always finding it as easy as it used to be. When Major League Baseball issued a warning to San Francisco Giants players for daring to write Bible verses on their Pride Night hats, Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) wrote: “So how does the @MLB get away with forcing their players to wear a hat promoting one particular political viewpoint and the attacking them for expressing another? This is about baseball. Not politics.”
“Central to the issue,” The Center Square explained Monday, “was baseball’s Pride Night game in San Francisco on June 12, when multiple players for the Giants – wearing insignia with rainbow colors through the interlocking SF – wrote Bible verses on their caps. Landen Roupp, born and raised in Rocky Mount in the district now represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Davis, started on the mound against the Chicago Cubs. Relievers J.T. Brubaker and Ryan Walker also took the field with Bible verses on their hats, and reliever Sam Hentges didn’t wear the rainbow SF cap instead choosing the traditional uniform hat with orange letters.”
This was unacceptable dissent as far as the commissars of MLB were concerned. Pat Courtney, MLB’s chief communications officer, fumed: "The writing on the cap violates our rules, and consistent with normal practice, we have warned the players about future violations.”
For the totalitarian-inclined left, everything is, or should be, about politics, and there is no sphere of life into which politics should not intrude. The Christian players had to be brought to heel and forced to express their love for the LGBT agenda. MLB’s top dogs cheerfully (or more likely, grumpily, as leftists don’t do anything cheerfully) ignored Murphy, but now they’re facing a bigger problem. The Center Square reported that Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon at the U.S. Department of Justice wrote a letter to MLB’s woker-than-woke commissioner, Rob Manfred, echoing Murphy’s concerns.
Facing a popular backlash as well, MLB lamely claimed that “to be clear, this routine verbal warning not to wear the hat in future games in not disciplinary and had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the message.” Yeah, sure. I was a baseball fan for many decades, before wokeness took over the major sports, and I remember many times over the years when players would write on their hats, usually a tribute to a departed teammate who had died, or simply been injured or traded. None of them were ever reprimanded.
And long after that, players endorsed Black Lives Matter, and MLB likewise had nothing to say. Dhillon wrote to Manfred: “MLB has asserted that it's warning to the Giants players ‘had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the message’ and that it merely is enforcing a policy that prohibits writing on uniforms. Yet, MLB has allowed players to wear uniform patches reading ‘Black Lives Matter.’ This double standard – under which players may not inscribe Bible verses on hats for one game only but may wear ‘Black Lives Matter’ patches for one game only – calls MLB’s true motives into question and raises serious concerns about MLB’s compliance with Title VII. Employers may not use facially neutral policies as ‘a pretext for discrimination.’”
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Dhillon also “reminded Manfred of the Civil Rights Act, and within it, that ‘employers must modify their uniform requirements to reasonably accommodate their employees’ exercise of religion.’”
Making this whole brouhaha even sillier is the fact that the dissident players weren’t sporting verses about homosexuals being put to death or rebelling against God. Instead, “whereas advocates of allowing homosexual activity have used the rainbow in flags and other displays, the verses the players chose direct the audience to the Bible. Genesis 9:12-16, the Scripture they wrote, is from the story of Noah’s ark. In Verse 11, God tells Noah never again ‘will there be a flood to destroy the earth.’ Verse 12 reveals the sign of the covenant, and in Verse 13, God says, ‘I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.’”
That’s the message that the leftist hardliners who run MLB couldn’t abide. And that’s why more and more Americans can’t abide MLB.
