As a recent guest on The Drew Mariani Show on Relevant Radio, I took calls from Catholic listeners very upset about the MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers hosting an anti-Catholic hate group that dubs itself the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.” These dudes in dresses don female-face (the new blackface) and mock not only women but America’s largest Christian group. They pole dance on crosses and hold “Hunky Jesus” and “Foxy Mary” contests.
READ MORE: My Religion Is Not Your Costume
The Dodgers find this prideful blasphemy just fabulous. They decided to honor the group with the team’s “Community Hero Award” on “Pride Night.”
Vin Scully, Tommy Lasorda, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, and other Dodgers legends of deep faith are rolling over in their graves (Sandy Koufax is still with us, and he’s surely outraged).
The callers to The Drew Mariani Show urged fellow Catholics to deluge the offices of Major League Baseball and its commissioner, Rob Manfred, with protests. I appreciate their efforts, but their complaints will receive nothing but snickering condescension from the political-cultural revolutionaries. They have a better chance of hitting a Clayton Kershaw curveball.
The reality is that Major League Baseball has made possible the religious bigotry trotted out in high heels and hairy legs at Dodgers Stadium. MLB celebrates Pride Night and, in fact, Pride Month. MLB’s letters that night are LGBTQ. Of course, the “T” in LGBTQ stands for “trans.”
This is trans.
The ugly Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are self-identified “queer and trans nuns.” Their order is certainly not recognized by the Los Angeles archdiocese, though it is recognized by the secular zealots at the Dodgers’ offices. That recognition is no surprise. When you indulge the LGBTQ alphabet, you indulge the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. It isn’t a big leap from drag queen story hour at the local library to bearded weirdos preening and prancing in fishnet stockings at the ballpark on Pride Night.
As American Spectator contributor Mary Frances Myler wrote in a piece aptly titled “My Religion Is Not Your Costume,” “The Dodgers debacle is sad, disturbing, and entirely predictable — as soon as the Dodgers hosted their first pride night, this month’s news was all but a foregone conclusion.”
Precisely. Inevitably.
And the Dodgers, of course, are hardly alone in throwing open the gates to Gomorrah. If you dare set out to American ballparks generally on Pride Night, you’re going to see such depravity. How many ballparks?
According to Outsports, 29 teams (effectively almost all of them) will host Pride Nights this June. The Outsports reporter celebrates:
The annual Outsports MLB Pride Night Guide is one of my favorite stories to assemble every year. It combines the sport I follow most passionately with celebrations of one of the most important parts of my identity.
Plus it’s a feature that presents dozens of opportunities to reference 1940s-era Hall of Famers and “[RuPaul’s] Drag Race Season 15” finalists.
The writer shares his “trepidation” over the backlash against the Dodgers and the “coordinated anti-LGBTQ attacks against Bud Light and Target,” which make him “a little wary about what the next month could bring.” Nonetheless:
[A] big part of Pride is simply showing up to represent our community and demonstrate that we will not back down in the face of powerful adversity.
At their heart, MLB Pride Nights are marketing-driven events. But in an atmosphere where religious fanatics, reactionary zealots, and homophobic wannabe influencers have convinced other corporations to walk back their Pride efforts, it’s important that 29 baseball teams are still going to openly celebrate our community. The Texas Rangers remain the lone holdout.
I hope all of these Pride Nights go off without a hitch.
That’s MLB’s hope, too. The Dodgers haven’t backed down to the “religious fanatics, reactionary zealots, and homophobic wannabe influencers,” and neither has MLB — nor ESPN, for that matter.
In fact, ESPN issues an official “Pride Night Guide” for all major sports. And as we saw with professional hockey, where the regular season mercifully ends before June, the NHL has forced a Pride Night on fans in months that aren’t Pride Month. Perhaps the Left’s cultural vanguard can create an entire Pride Year, thereby never missing a moment to parade drag queens at your once apolitical sporting event.
For the Left, even sports must be politicized and ideologized (and destroyed). More than that, the Left’s new values must be shoved down your throat, for a full month. Even Jesus Christ and Christmas don’t get a full month. Leave it to the Left to elevate pride — the first and worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, the sin of Satan — to a monthlong celebration.
As for athletes who don’t genuflect to the new dogma, they are heretics to be denounced and excommunicated. Amazingly, a USA Today columnist accuses NHL players who dare dissent of being “gutless” and “cowardly.” The courageous thing to do, you see, is to keep your sincerely held beliefs to yourself, tuck your tail between your legs, and shuffle along with the herd.
As for sports figures who step outside the herd, they’re deemed not only gutless cowards but bigots — fanatics “hiding” behind their faith as an “excuse” to “discriminate.” It is those who baaaa and moo with the herd who are modern profiles in courage.
There are no boundaries to the upside-downness of the world of the liberal.
Getting back to those Catholic callers to The Drew Mariani Show, who urged one another to send emails to MLB’s offices in New York, they should know that the problem isn’t that MLB would never support a boycott. Recall that two years ago, MLB’s political commissar of a commissioner, Rob Manfred, actually boycotted the city of Atlanta. Manfred did so as punishment to the Atlanta Braves in protest of Georgia’s Republican governor’s new election-integrity laws. The partisan Manfred did the political bidding of Stacey Abrams, Joe Biden, and the Democrats.
Readers might recall the reporting on Manfred’s Georgia boycott here at The American Spectator by our veteran correspondent, George Jean Nathan. Filing from his corner office at McSorley’s Old Ale House in Manhattan (with a tall glass of Scotch), the great Nathan reported the following in his now-famous dispatch, “MLB’s Rogue Commissioner Must Resign”:
Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred is a scoundrel — a boil on the backside of baseball. He has politicized America’s beloved national pastime. Our sacred and uniquely American sport has been soiled by one man’s partisan politics. The commissioner has gone rogue with the Office of the Commissioner….
Rob Manfred has turned baseball into a political spectacle, an arm of the Democratic Party. He turned the national pastime into a national embarrassment by pulling the plug on the annual All-Star Game in Atlanta for political reasons. For those unaware of the man’s folly, he did this under the counsel of two mental incompetents, Ms. Stacey Abrams and Mr. Joe Biden. Baseball’s commissioner had the temerity and idiocy to take seriously a laughable political caricature clumsily enunciated by these two babbling clowns, who dubbed Georgia’s new election-integrity laws “racist.” Or, in the words of our poor president suffering dementia, “Jim Crow 2.0.”…
Manfred — the man is a fraud. His name practically rhymes with “fraud.” Or at least it would, by golly, if I could rewrite the laws of language like he rewrites the laws of baseball! Manfraud. There you go!
Readers will recall that brother Nathan’s jeremiad became an instant classic, launching the Manfred Must Go movement. But, alas, Manfred remains.
Fast forward to June 2023: Would Rob Manfred and his fellow leftist ideologues at MLB’s Manhattan offices support a boycott this time around? Of course not. They will not even respond to the pleas of Sen. Marco Rubio and the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue. “The ‘sisters’ are men who dress in lewd imitation of Roman Catholic nuns,” wrote Rubio to Manfred. “The group’s motto ‘go and sin some more,’ is a perversion of Jesus’ command to ‘go, and sin no more.’”
Manfred and MLB surely howled at that one. Sin no more? Hah, what prudes!
What this means for the Dodgers depravity is that Rob Manfred and MLB aren’t going to lift a Louisville Slugger to stop the sacrilege nor, certainly, end Pride Night at your ballpark. Quite the contrary: They’re big fans — pioneers even. For them, Pride Night is a grand slam. And to them, anyone offended by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is a transphobic troglodyte who deserves a beanball.
