The rainbow disconnection

This was my first running off at the mouth:

Eh, what a maroon! California Assemblyman Scott Weiner, now the Democrat nominee for Nancy Pelosi’s old Congressional seat, has beclowned himself in the kerfuffle over the Giants pitchers who wrote Bible verse citations on the caps with a (bastardized) rainbow logo the team expected them to wear on Pride Night. He stated the players “defaced their Pride caps with a biblical passage that has been hijacked by homophobes to ‘take back’ the rainbow from LGBTQ people.” He asked, if players were going to cite Bible verses on their caps, why did they have to do it on Pride Night?

Numero uno, the rainbow has been a Judeo-Christian symbol for a divine promise never again to destroy the world for a reset by a flood for millennia before Scott the Weiner decided it’s the property of not only lesbian, gay, and bisexual people but the people who’ve been colonizing us. It’s not your freaking property, Weiner.

Numero two-o, given that the verses cited are about the rainbow, when else would anyone write those citations on their caps on the night those caps featured a rainbow design, particularly to make a statement about what the rainbow represents to them? Some people just go out of their way to point out to others what victims they supposedly are.

There are people saying this was a nasty thing to do given the large gay population in the Bay Area, which includes both Giants fans and people who think they’re better than the unwashed masses because they turn up their noses at anything “sportsball.” In an ideal world, Pride Night would have been just one of the many special ethnic nights to market to specific demographics, even were it to be one of the major ones like Fiesta Gigantes.

In this actual world, there are people whose religious beliefs sanction only monogamous heterosexual pair bonding, in no small part because that’s a basis for family foundation that actually sustains civilization. Is it wrong (or “homophobic”) of them to adopt a live-and-let-live approach to same-sex attracted people while declining to promote them or their purported symbols? Yes, some of them are outright hostile to gays, just as there are gays who are outright hostile to conservative Christians and conservative religious Jews—e.g., Scott Weiner, who things anyone who affirms their religion is some kind of bigot.

(I won’t say the four pitchers are making a statement of Christian “pride,” because I’m sure they’d tell you it’s not about pride, because they believe they are sinners whose karma Jesus took away by having allowed himself to be sacrificed in a really gnarly way, and are devoted to being grateful for that.)

For their part, the Giants issued a statement expressing regret for the “pain and anger” caused by players who wrote Bible verses on their Pride Night caps, while reaffirming the organization’s commitment to inclusion and the LGBTQ+ [sic] community. The team emphasized that baseball should be a place where everyone feels welcome, respected, and valued, but also noted that they respect individual players’ personal choices regarding participation in team promotions.

MLB, though, has the knives out. In response, their are public officials saying they will push back against what they see as harassment of Christians who will not bend the knee ... or burn a grain of incense to the Emperor (classical allusion). Looks like a big scrap’s a-brewin’, and it should be fun to watch.

In other, briefer comments on social media, I got responses calling the altered caps deliberate disrespect of the gay community. I’ve seen deliberate disrespect of the gay community, and this doesn’t strike me as that. I’m more inclined to take the reasons at face value: unwillingness to support a message on religious grounds, and maybe even a believer’s self-perceived responsibility to offer an alternative that’s actually on the innocuous side.

I also got “rules are rules.” Under the rules, three of the pitchers got the warning that goes with a first violation of uniform defacement regulations. For all I know, the three warned pitchers might welcome having the warning in their files as proof of their willingness to make a statement for their faith. It’s certainly in the spirit of another cherished Bay Area institution: civil disobedience. As for “rules are rules, Scott Weiner also claimed “The Giants should publicly commit to enforcing rules around uniform defacement and should not effectively create a homophobia exemption to those rules.”

Elsewhere, the reactions have been much more heated. The Athletic, a sports publication owned by the New York Times, “made the fantastical claim that, apparently, writing a Bible verse on your ball cap will cause gay people to suffer actual harm.” (Thanks to The Federalist for getting behind the paywall for us.)

“Without the support of their community at large, LGBTQIA+ individuals are much more likely to be told that they are without value,” The Athletic’s essayist claimed. “They are likelier to be abused, to self-harm, to get kicked out of their homes, to be bullied, to be assaulted. They are at risk because of a society that still doesn’t always accept them, even after decades of progress.” Doesn’t always accept them. We are so close to 100% acceptance in society today, if not outright overcelebration, it isn’t funny. Maybe it’s that some people are so used to that overcelebration that should they hear a less than adoring word, they panic.

Look, for generations gay people have come out with the assumption acceptance will be hard to find. It comes with the territory. We’ve created spaces where we can comfortably be ourselves and celebrate each other. Our original concept of gay pride was that we had nothing of which to be ashamed by being gay, and we had every right to feel good about ourselves as individuals. And, we’ve done the work, both through working or rights and being good neighbors, to have a fighting chance at enough acceptance to stop looking over our shoulders all the time.

The 1950s called: they want their stereotype of gay lives being lives of self-loathing (and alcoholism) back. The reason they call self esteem self esteem is that, in the long run, you have to achieve it yourself.

Meanwhile, San Francisco’s conservative Amazon Harmeet Dhillon, Chief of Civil Rights for the Department of Justice, has referred MLB to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to be investigated for a private-sector workplace discrimination claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. To wit, employers are required under the law to make reasonable accommodations for employee’s religious beliefs and practices. Like no Saturday shifts for Jews.

“They do not mind when players are putting messages that the woke left approves of onto their uniforms,” Dhillon said. Meanwhile, the players’ actions were “[T]heir quiet way of saying, ‘I don’t adopt this message.’” She also said, “I’m a Sikh. If my employer told me I had to wear a hat that celebrates the caste system or says women are inferior to men, I wouldn’t do it.”

The money quote: “It doesn’t really matter how gay San Francisco is—these workers have rights.”

Time to lay in more popping corn.