There’s no team like the Dodgers, but baseball shouldn’t be political
This one’s gonna hurt. It’s easy to boycott products you don’t generally use or care much about. There are plenty of beverages other than Bud Light and other places to shop besides Target. But there’s no other game like baseball and no team like the Dodgers.
The Dodgers organization ignited a firestorm when it made the morally bankrupt call to honor an obnoxious, anti-Catholic drag group at the team’s annual Pride Night in June. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
(Motto: “Go and sin some more”) will be recognized “for their community service and ministry and for promoting respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment.”
One has to wonder if the Dodgers’ ownership even vetted the Sisters, whose “ministry” includes donning white face and cartoonish cornetts in blatant mockery of the Catholic Church and Christian faith. YouTube videos of the group’s fundraising events show sexually charged Hunky Jesus contests and lurid dance performances desecrating the cross, Christianity’s most sacred symbol.
The Dodgers initially rescinded their invitation after an angry outcry from conservative Catholics and Protestants. Less than a week later, after “much thoughtful feedback” from the
LGBTQ community, the Dodgers reinstated their invite to the Sisters with a groveling apology and a promise to “use our platform to support all of our fans who make up the diversity of the Dodger family.”
All their fans, that is, except backward Bible thumpers who don’t know satire when it’s shoved in their faces.
The Dodgers organization has hosted Pride Night at Dodgers Stadium for a decade with little pushback, but in honoring the Sisters, they lend status and respectability to a group that is tantamount to the school-yard bully, the boorish oaf who ridicules others, then claims he was just joking.
The can’t-you-take-a-joke defense doesn’t hold water in today’s cancel culture of the left’s making. The Sisters promote their “queer and trans nuns” agenda and brazenly appropriate Catholic faith trappings, an act usually considered a cultural affront to those on the left. Religious bigotry gets a pass, though it’s hard to imagine that those defending such behavior would be as tolerant if the Sisters’ head coverings were hijabs instead of habits.
It’s also hard to imagine the Dodgers would have even considered inviting the Sisters if Tommy Lasorda and Vin Scully, legendary members of the Dodger family and faithful Catholics, were still part of the team.
If the Dodgers really want to “use their platform” to support their fans, they’d do well to remember what baseball and the team are to them.
It’s introducing kids and grandkids to America’s national pastime in a stadium filled with 56,000 close friends.
It’s losing oneself in the game’s complexities and marveling at the extraordinary athleticism and skill of the men born to play it.
It’s cheerfully dropping a wad of cash on Dodger dogs and peanuts because “a hotdog at the ballpark is better than a steak at the Ritz,” as the late actor Humphrey Bogart once said.
It’s the 11-year-old boy passing by on a bicycle who spotted my Dodgers sweatshirt and pedaled over with a wide grin to chat for a few sweet moments about the mind-blowing game Clayton Kershaw had pitched the night before.
The one thing baseball isn’t, or shouldn’t be, is political. The only controversy in baseball should be atrocious calls made against our boys in blue by biased and near-sighted umps. Sadly, the era of the exuberant Lasorda and the gentle Scully is over, woke extremism reigns, and the Dodger organization has spoken.
We Christians have heard them. Loud and clear.