YOU WILL BE PROUD
The lead story on the CBS Sports website recently reported that five players on the Tampa Bay Rays chose to not wear a LGBT+ logo on their uniforms.
The first thought was why anyone thought five baseball players not wearing a political symbol could possibly be national news. Apparently, the perceived significance came in a decision to not celebrate something (LGBT pride month) which some now expect everyone to celebrate; that having LGBT “pride,” or at least publicly signaling that you do, is now something of a requirement, even for the vast majority of the population that isn’t LGBT.
By choosing to not celebrate in the approved fashion, the five ball players ran the risk of being perceived as hostile to the LGBT movement, even if they aren’t.
Thus we are reminded that the purpose of virtue signaling in a woke age is not so much to convey what you really think but to acquire immunity from attack.
Expressing sentiments you don’t really share becomes imperative. It’s no longer enough to be accepting of members of the LGBT community in your daily life. You must also now apparently wear a symbol to prove it, or else.
In a remarkably short period of time, we have moved from demands for tolerance and respect to demands for approval and now, finally, something resembling coerced celebration.
Within this context, it isn’t just dissent that makes you a potential target but failure to give assent with sufficient gusto.
In the late and thoroughly unlamented Soviet Union, people protected themselves by hanging portraits of Marx and Lenin in their apartments, even if they despised everything about the communism that had made their lives so miserable. In America we pen essays expressing our commitment to “diversity, equity and inclusion” when applying for college jobs and put LGBT symbols on our baseball jerseys in a similar effort to acquire acceptance and deflect suspicion, even if we roll our eyes when doing so.
The gay rights movement succeeded, and made America a better place in the process, because it borrowed the template of the earlier civil and women’s rights movements, which were built on appeals to justice and equality and fairness and taught that discrimination on the basis of ascription (skin color and sex) was morally wrong.
Even if there were substantive differences between pigmentation on the one hand and sexual preference (and thus behavior based on preference) on the other, it was still persuasive enough to convince a majority of Americans that gay Americans should enjoy the same rights as other Americans, including the right to marry.
It is far from obvious, however, that everyone who supports gay marriage also supports the right of biological men pretending to be women to hang out in women’s locker rooms and compete in sporting contests with biological women. Or that anyone who raises concerns on that latter count is a bigot merely for having done so.
Polls tell us that the same majorities that now support gay marriage also oppose the more extreme demands of the transgender movement, to the point where conflating it all under the same LGBT+ moniker could lead to a loss of support outside LGBT ranks and dissension within them.
Americans, contrary to woke narratives, are generally tolerant people who believe in live and let live.
But we also believe in minding our own business first and foremost and are tired of being told that we are morally deficient if we don’t enthusiastically celebrate the sexual preferences of other people.
Some of us were writing columns supporting gay marriage long before Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden expeditiously came around to the idea and neither we, nor anyone else, need wear a logo to prove we’re not bigots.