Major League Baseball has issued stern warnings to three players from the San Francisco Giants after they wrote Bible verses on their caps for the league’s “Pride Night”. It’s an uncanny throwback to the excesses of “peak woke”. Didn’t we leave behind such authoritarian “tolerance” back in 2020?

No, it turns out, and such heavy-handed measures go a long way towards explaining the paradoxical decline of support for all things LGBT. This is especially evident among members of Generation Z, who’ve only experienced the movement as a corporate-led, HR-style exercise in policing personal expression and coercing unanimity, rather than one centered around emancipation.

After facing ridicule online, the MLB released a statement that its warnings had nothing to do with the substance of the messages on the caps. “To be clear, this routine verbal warning not to wear the hat in future games is not disciplinary and had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the message,” the league declared. “We respect players’ right to free expression.”

Maybe. Then again, this is the only incident of its kind that many fans can remember, and it just so happens to involve a handful of players going out of their way to associate the Pride rainbow symbol with the Noahic Covenant. One player, right-hander Landen Roupp, had written “Gen 9-12:16” on his cap’s rainbow, in reference to the verses in Genesis in which the Almighty establishes his first covenant with the patriarch Noah, and through him with humankind, vowing not to destroy the world again after the flood.

There’s nothing inherently exclusionary about the Biblical message, as several of the players noted in self-defense. For many religiously conservative parents who don’t embrace the full-spectrum LGBT movement, moreover, it isn’t uncommon to explain the rainbows that adorn their streets during June as a reference to the Noahic Covenant.

By this point, corporate institutions should have learned to permit these sorts of compromise formations. Denying them, one suspects, has a lot to do with the precipitous collapse in support for LGBT people and causes documented by social scientists. Just this month, the Gallup polling organization found that support for same-sex marriage is down six points from its peak in 2022, while only 62% of people view such relations as moral — the lowest figure for this question in a decade.

The movement’s legal gains are more likely to be reversed when its advocates, particularly those who occupy the commanding heights of corporate America, brook no dissent. Problems arise when they insist that formal equality and rights aren’t enough, but must be met with an interior renunciation of religious and cultural beliefs even slightly at odds with their social vision.

Perhaps Giants manager Tony Vitello said it best when admonished by The Athletic about whether he’d discussed players’ ideological posture in relation to Pride beforehand. “Not really,” he shrugged. “I mean, just kind of a general knowledge [that] the individuals have the freedom to do what they think is best.” That’s a quintessentially American approach, one worth fighting for as the nation that enshrined the First Amendment turns 250.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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