The San Francisco Giants asked for this controversy; Major League Baseball asked for this controversy; LGTBQ+ culture bullies asked for it too. They got it. Good.
Three Giants pitchers, Landen Roupp, who started last Friday’s game against the Cubs, JT Brubaker and Ryan Walker, who also appeared in the game, have been officially reprimanded by MLB, which notified the players that similar behavior “would not be tolerated in the future.”
The three pitchers had Bible verses written on their caps. Roupp’s cap read “Gen 9:12-16” with the writing reaching the “Pride” logo on his cap. It was “Pride Night,” when Major League Baseball forces its players to express a political and social position with which they may not personally agree. The verse in question reads like this:
It is not an anti-homosexuality passage, but then any Bible reference on Pride Night might be seen as subversive.
“The writing on the cap violates our rules, and consistent with normal practice, we have warned the players about future violations,” MLB’s chief communications officer Pat Courtney told “The Athletic.” Later, the office added as clarification,
Ethics Alarms 
the obvious analogy is Colin Kapernick.
is he an ethics hero for not standing during the national anthem?
is standing a form of compelled speech?
is it just that he whined about the fallout from his decision
is Kapernick’s case analogous or not?
-Jut
No. The National Anthem is part of all pro sports going back to the beginning, and participating with the team is a contractual obligation of each player. The Anthem is also routine, unifying tradition. Furthermore, the Kneeling stunt disrupted the game experience and made it political, which fans neither pay for nor expect. In addition, the entire Pride pandering is divisive per se. Unlike the kneeling stunt, not a single attendee of the game was made aware of the Bible verse. Even the front row can’t see the caps in that detail, so this, if you want to call it a protest, was non-disruptive and interfered with no aspect of the game experience at all.
Maybe, but is there a difference between insisting on courtesy and insisting on allegiance to a social issue?
I’d say there is. Showing respect for the anthem is part of the conduct package players know they’re entering into. Unless it’s specifically part of the contract, being human billboards is not. I’d be less sympathetic if they were race car drivers, but that’s not part of baseball culture.
This is equivalent to making people wear hats saying Christ is King or a MAGA hat. The left would be apoplectic.
“It is not an anti-homosexuality passage, but then any Bible reference on Pride Night might be seen as subversive.”
Particularly the verse in question which sought to reclaim the rainbow as a symbol of God’s promise to humanity never to destroy the Earth by water again.
And of course, we’re talking about San Francisco. The town that killed Thom Brenneman’s career.
I’m glad you and Fun (see below) explicated the verse.
True, the bible passage did not reference homosexuality, and it was about the rainbow being a symbol of faithful love.
However, the rainbow came after the flood which came after a wickedness was expressed by mankind and accumulated with no abating that we take to be figuratively described because we have such a stable world compared to pre-deluvian humanity. We don’t really understand how nasty things really were.
Any reference to the God of Christianity in this context is also a reference to judgment and thus to sin and thus to homosexuality and thus opposite of pleasant happy and good like the recent Hello Fresh advert wants us to think.
The gay lobby chose the rainbow for all of the excellent features of the rainbow that could be enumerated. The three players said hey the rainbow means this to us. The gay lobby shit out a bunch of baseballs because they act like they own the rainbow as a symbol and the three players just co-opted it, setting up a provocative cultural fight for ownership.
Rather than just letting people have a take on things and play ball together, having ball in common, the response to the players is effectively equivalent to the Uk and EU suppressing speech. In the end there will be a net loss for gay “pride”.
The bible verse was an excellent middle finger to the gay lobby for their forced speech approach to cultural change similar to the pictures we have of dogs and water cannon being unleashed on black people during the civil rights movement.
Great analysis. Thank you.
And for the appropriation of the rainbow for its own purposes. Fighting back against innocuous symbols being appropriated for group identity purposes is ethical. The okay gesture, the Gadsden flag and other traditional long-understood symbols have been under fire because of their alleged appropriation by far-right extremist groups. My argument is that we should not allow extremists to appropriate neutral symbols and gestures. That includes letting rainbows be coopted to only and always refer to the LGBT community.
And then there’s Jackie Robinson Day.
Can’t find fault with that. Baseball is properly celebrating its most significant contribution to American society and ethics by being the catalyst for the end of segregation nation wide. It’s as valid as the U>S. celebrating July 4th. Anyone who finds the “42” uniform display divisive has a serious problem.
There are times I wonder whether race relations and the condition of the black underclass are much better now than they were in the early ‘sixties.