THE RAINBOW ON THE BASEBALL CAP

Rarely do my personal interests, my political commitments, and my Humanistic Jewish values line up as perfectly as they did last week when baseball, gay rights, and rational thinking all came together in one national controversy.

As you probably know, June is Pride Month. What you may not know is that for some time now, a good number of Major League Baseball (MLB) teams have marked the occasion with a special Pride Night (or Day) at the their ballparks

This really isn't that unusual. Major League Baseball teams frequently hold special "theme nights" throughout the season. These vary from team to team. Some clubs hold Jewish Heritage Nights. Some do not. Some have military appreciation events, college nights, faith nights, Italian Heritage Nights, Irish Heritage Nights, and dozens of other community-focused promotions. Some feature special giveaways or ceremonies. Others are barely noticeable.

I go to a lot of Tigers games so I've happened upon a lot of these occasions. A few years ago Arthur and I, quite by coincidence, found ourselves at Tigers Pride Night. It was so understated we might have missed it if someone hadn't mentioned it. 

By contrast, we just happened to attend one on a trip to Houston. We hadn't planned our vacation around it and had no idea it would take place the night we saw the Astros. But understated it was not. It took no time at all to figure it out when we were gifted with Astros-themed pride caps and no shortage of rainbow finery all around the stadium. 

.

Like the other heritage or theme nights, every team does it differently. But I certainly would not have expected Houston to out-do Detroit (at least not the Houston I grew up in). But if you were asked to guess which cities might out-do them all, you might easily put San Francisco on your list. Indeed, San Francisco, one of the iconic cities in the history of LGBT civil rights, does tend to do them up big. 

Pride imagery appears throughout the ballpark. The familiar "SF" logo is often recolored in Pride colors and painted on the field. It's also sewn into a one-night-only uniform cap that the entire team wears to show support.

Well, maybe not the entire team.

This year several players objected to this forced show of support. Rather than simply don the cap, they wrote Bible references on their black caps in white marker. One cited the Book of Genesis' rainbow covenant tale.

This protest was in clear violation of MLB rules.Those regulations prohibit players from altering uniforms and equipment to express personal messages. Professional athletes are paid extraordinary sums of money to play a game. But just like anyone else with a job, they are also paid to follow the rules of their workplace. Usually, uniform regulations are the least burdensome of those obligations.

What about their First Amendment rights? That's a weak defense. The First Amendment protects citizens from government censorship. It does not prevent employers from regulating workplace attire. Just ask the Yankees. Until very recently they were prohibited from wearing facial hair.

So quite obviously, the players were wrong. At least according to the rules of the job.

But were they wrong to resent being asked to personally display a rainbow version of their team's logo?

That's not a legal question. It's a personal one. And this being America, we respect the difference. Or at least we used to.

This is because Americans absolutely have a right to resent anything we don't like. The sort of half-written, half-unwritten rule that good people try to follow is that we may disagree to our heart's content, so long as we do so with a measure of respect for one another and obedience to the law. Personally, I respect the feelings that prompted their rebellion, however much I disagree with them.

The very long and very painful struggle for LGBT civil rights was never, in my view, about forcing others to approve of us. It was about securing equal rights under the law. It was about housing, employment, parenting, military service, and marriage.

Those of us who worked so hard to attain marriage equality spent decades asking a simple question of our opponents: In what way would our marriages interfere with yours?

Requiring people who continue to object to appear as if they support the movement betrays that principle. Why should they be forced to pretend they agree?

Not only does it contradict their rights to hold their own beliefs, this sort of compelled symbolism insults the very struggle that we LGBT activists fought for over so many years. Our goal was never to force people to agree with us. It was to secure the same rights they enjoyed. And there's a big difference.

Since the legalization of same-sex marriage most people have accommodated themselves to a "live and let live" attitude. Now they are being confronted with stories like this one where that is no longer the request of activists. Now they are watching baseball players being compelled to support something that still makes many of them uncomfortable. Is it any wonder that they increasingly suspect that what activists really wanted all along was not equal treatment but ideological conformity?

Fair or not, incidents like this reinforce that suspicion.

Major League Baseball and the San Francisco Giants have every right to hold Pride Nights. They should. In San Francisco there's a broad consensus.

But that does not remove the need to do so in a way that avoids creating needless conflict.

If the Giants want Pride logos on the scoreboard, the outfield wall, or throughout the ballpark, I support it. A player catching a fly ball in front of a rainbow logo is simply playing baseball. Not one of the Giants let a fly ball drop rather than go near it.

But asking players to wear that logo on their uniforms is different. It turns a team celebration into a personal statement.

The players were wrong to write on their caps. MLB was right about that.

But I think the Giants made a mistake as well.

The fight for LGBT equality succeeded because we asked for equal treatment, not compelled agreement. Pride Nights can and should celebrate that achievement. But they should do so in a way that welcomes participation rather than demanding it.

Our goal was never to force people to agree with us. It was to secure the same rights they enjoy.