Fought To A Draw

The headlines at the right-wing aggregators were misleading: Dodgers Wind Up With About 60 People Attending The Game For Their Anti-Catholic Stunt. What actually happened was that the Dodgers, caught between a rock and a hard place, split the difference and gave the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence their community hero award at a ceremony on the field but considerably before the actual game. (Most of the aggregators, including Breitbart at the link, eventually clarified this.) The 60 people who were there were just a select group watching the little pre-game ceremony. Nevertheless, a few booed loudly.

So the Dodgers' strategy was to finesse the "sisters" without re-un-disinviting them, without an apology or even a direct acknowledgement of the problem, and hope it all blows over. This has mirrored the corporate strategies of Bud Light and Target, as well to a lesser extent other companies like Kohls and Starbucks, which have quietly removed Pride Month signage and merch in hopes this will avert the consumer boycotts that consumed the other two.

This response by the corporate mainstream to date has been remarkably pusillanimous, and so far, it hasn't fixed things.

Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth plans on hitting the road this summer amid major issues with Bud Light.

The alcohol powerhouse company has seen its stock price get hammered and Bud Light sales collapse ever since BL decided to team up with Dylan Mulvaney.

The incredibly stupid March Madness promo featuring the transgender activist was more than two months ago, but the bleeding just doesn’t stop.

Sales were down more than 24% in the latest data.

The "listeing tour" strikes me as a last-ditch attempt by CEO Whitworth to hold onto his job, but still without an apology or acknowledgement of the problem. In fact, it's just a continuation of the strategy that's put them where they are now: pretend it was a little glitch, fire the lower-level managers involved, and tell the distributors they'll sorta-kinda fix it down the read.

But was Corporate America caught by surprise here? I'm not so sure. As I pointed out in this post, professional hockey players resisted wearing "pride" logos on their jerseys as early as January of this year, well before the Bud Light controversy broke out. Fully a year ago, five Tampa Bay Rays players refused to wear "pride" logos for the team's 2022 Pride Night. Although Major League Baseball appears to have solidified a policy of not requiring players to wear "pride" insignia in the wake of the Dodgers fiasco, this had already been raised by the players' union over the past year.

With June being Pride Month, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred was asked Thursday following the owners meetings in New York about the possibility of LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations being standardized leaguewide in the future.

Each individual club currently makes the determination of whether to host a Pride-themed night, but Manfred said Thursday that the league has discouraged teams from wearing Pride logos on their jerseys this season to "protect" the players.

As I've said here already, the issue in professional sports is that the star players have individual brands, which are valuable for endorsements and retirement income. As Bud Light made clear, the wrong sort of association can badly damage a brand, and wearing a totem that endorses the gay lifestyle can do just that, since it can carry the implication that the player himself is gay. The players' union was aware of this well before Bud Light, and Major League Baseball has been brought into line with the program.

But there's clearly a bigger trend.

The annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention voted to affirm a decision made earlier this year to remove Saddleback Church, a major southern California congregation founded by the pastor and author Rick Warren, due to its having women pastors.

Representatives at the conference in New Orleans overwhelmingly supported the decision to expel the church, according to the vote count reported Wednesday morning, despite pleas a day earlier by Warren, the author of “The Purpose Driven Life.” The representatives, known as messengers, also voted to affirm the ousters of two other churches, including Fern Creek in Louisville, Kentucky, which has had a female pastor since 1993.

The vote to uphold those removals came just a few hours before a two-thirds majority of the Southern Baptist Convention – the largest Protestant denomination in the United States – separately voted to approve an amendment to its constitution that would more broadly prohibit churches from having women hold any pastoral title.

Contrast this with the contemporary schism in the United Methodist Church, which is the second-largest US Protestant denomination after the Southern Baptists, in which the Methodists, while acknowledging division over the issue of sexuality, simply offered the conservatives an amicable divorce, allowing them to leave but retaining control over the brand. In contrast, the Southern Baptists told the liberals to get out and kept the brand as well.

The Methodists in turn were trying to avoid the precedent set by the Episcopalians two generations earlier, whereby dissidents walked out with their property, causing decades of wasteful litigation while destroying that denomination's carefully nurtured prestige. In fact, learning nothing, they repeated the same pattern, first in the 1970s over ordaining women and then in the 2000s over gay bishops, with the end result that traditionally stable careers for all but a few Episcopal clergy have disappeared.

It looks to me as if the Southern Baptists finally reversed this Protestant trend of feckless piecemeal appeasement, which is why they're going to continue as the largest Protestant denomination in the US, unlike the Episcopalians, which were always the smallest.

The overall picture suggests to me that the more observant Christian and Jewish denominations have begun to fight secularism to a draw, something that started with the lawsuits over the COVID lockdowns. I think about the 1916 naval battle of Jutland, which was in fact a near-defeat of the British, but its effect was to keep the German fleet in port for the rest of thr war, which was one factor that led to an eventual German defeat in 1918. I think the 2023 Battle of Bud Light may be something similar in a much more extended conflict between the forces of secularism and the forces of natural law.

At minimum, the forces of secularism have at least temporatily lost the initiative, and official pusillanimity has begun to prove an ineffective strategy.