Dodgers Pride Night Controversy: Religious People Speak Out

Devout baseball fans may view their team’s performance as heavenly or hellish, depending on the quality of the game. Currently, it’s the Los Angeles Dodgers’ way of handling their annual Pride Night — not the team’s record — that has provoked emotional reactions from religious people, including prominent faith leaders, Catholic nuns, and even the All-Star ace of the United States. team.

Indeed, three senior American Catholic leaders suggested this week that the team had committed blasphemy.

The Dodgers have held Pride Nights for 10 years, but this year’s edition — which took place Friday night — was caught up in a high-profile controversy last month.

Under a barrage of criticism from some conservative Catholics, the team withdrew an invitation for a satirical LGBTQ+ group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to be honored on Pride Night. The Sisters’ performers—mostly men who dress flamboyantly as nuns—are active in protests and charity programs.

A week later, after a fierce backlash from LGBTQ+ groups and their allies, the Dodgers reversed course and again invited the Sisters’ Los Angeles chapter to be honored for their charitable work and issued an apology to the LGBTQ+ community .

The Dodgers’ reversal was welcomed by LGBTQ+ allies, including some Catholic nuns. But it infuriated many conservative Catholics, even at the highest levels of the American hierarchy.

On Monday, the team was criticized in a statement by Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and the president of the American Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Military Service.

They asked Catholics to pray on Friday “as an act of reparation for the blasphemies against our Lord that we see in our culture today.”

“A professional baseball team has shockingly chosen to honor a group whose lewdness and vulgarity in mocking our Lord, his mother and devoted women cannot be overstated,” the archbishops said. “This is not only offensive and hurtful to Christians everywhere; it is blasphemy.”

While official Catholic teaching is against gay marriage and same-sex sexual activity, there are many Catholics who want the Church to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ people. Among them are nuns in the US who have served with empathy for LGBTQ+ Catholics, noting this when the Sisters of Perpetual Indulggence hit the headlines last month.

One of them, Sister Jeannine Gramick, has been helping LGBTQ+ Catholics for over 50 years and is a co-founder of New Ways Ministry, which advocates on their behalf.

She publicly shared a letter she wrote to the Dodgers welcoming their re-invitation to the drag group and saying the members deserved recognition for their charitable work.

“While I am uncomfortable with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulggence using the nuns’ old clothes to draw attention to bigotry, whether Catholic or not, there is a hierarchy of values ​​in this situation,” wrote Gramick.

“I believe that any group that serves the community, especially those less fortunate or on the margins of society, should be honored.”

However, Sister Luisa Derouen, known for helping transgender Catholics, said she was “deeply offended” by the Dodgers’ decision to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

“I realize they do a lot of good for a lot of people with their philanthropic work, and I thank them for that,” she told the AP via email. “But where my passion comes from the most about this is with regard to my religious life.”

“I’ve passionately tried for about 30 years to help people understand and respect the lives of gay, lesbian and transgender people,” she added. “Religious women are their best allies in the Catholic Church – we don’t deserve to have our lives caricatured in this humiliating way.”

“Why can’t they do all their great work without disdaining our lives when we’ve done so much to help others respect their lives?”

Robert Barron, a Catholic bishop in southern Minnesota and a former auxiliary bishop in Los Angeles, told his 240,000 followers on Twitter that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence “can only be described as an anti-Catholic hate group.”

“I’m a huge baseball fan. I even threw out the first pitch at a Dodgers game,” Barron tweeted. “But I would encourage my friends in LA to boycott the Dodgers. Let’s not just pray, let’s raise our voices in defense of our Catholic faith.”

Criticism was not confined to Catholic ranks. Rev. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told listeners of his syndicated radio show that the Dodgers “completely capitulated.”

“The company is falling all over itself with what one author years ago called ‘The Art of the Public Grovel,'” Mohler said.

MLB pitchers Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers and Trevor Williams of the Washington Nationals criticized the Dodgers for reinviting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, saying they disliked the group’s mockery of Catholicism. Williams on Twitter encouraged his fellow Catholics “to reconsider their support for an organization that allows this kind of mockery of its fans.”

But each pitcher said he had no objection to the wider tradition of Pride Nights.

“This has nothing to do with the LGBTQ community or Pride or anything like that,” Kershaw said. “This is just a group mocking a religion. I don’t agree with that.”

Some conservative religious leaders said they are against the whole concept of Pride Nights.

“MLB teams have no corporate sponsorship of highly divisive events like Pride Nights and instead need to focus on playing baseball,” prominent megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress said via email.

His church, First Baptist Dallas, is about 20 miles from the home field of the Texas Rangers, the only MLB team not to host a Pride Night this season.

“All Pride events are attempts to celebrate what God has condemned,” Jeffress wrote. “Christians are right to boycott companies and organizations like MLB teams that try to stuff their godless and offensive agendas down Americans’ throats.”

A similar condemnation of Pride Nights came from Brent Leatherwood, chief of the public policy department of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination.

“These displays continue to confirm how far our culture is currently from biological and sexual reality,” said Leatherwood, reiterating the SBC’s rejection of same-sex marriages and sexual relations.

In contrast, Rev. Alex Santora, who oversees an LGBTQ-welcoming parish in Hoboken, New Jersey, says Pride Nights are helpful in fighting prejudice.

“Pride Nights organized by sports teams and Pride displays set up by companies recognize that accepting the diversity of sexual and gender orientations is normal in society,” he said. “It sends a valuable message to children and teens that acceptance is important and contributes to good mental health.”

The Dodgers’ Pride Night saga followed LGBTQ+-related struggles for some other major companies. Bud Light teamed up with a transgender influencer, then tried to back his support amid backlash. Similarly, Target’s support of the LGBTQ+ community has led to hostile, homophobic criticism, as well as calls from LGBTQ+ activists not to give in to the pressure.

A spokesperson for the country’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organization, Laurel Powell of the Human Rights Campaign, said the proliferation of Pride Nights – and similar actions in other economic sectors – is encouraging.

“They are an important signal to the LGBTQ community that we are valued by these organizations, that our support, our faces in the stands, are welcome,” she said. “It’s also a signal to other people about where their values ​​are.”

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