Fear Of Being The Next Bud Light

"There is a great disturbance in the Force."

"I have felt it."

"We have a new enemy, the young rebel who destroyed the Death Star. I have no doubt this boy is the offspring of Anakin Skywalker."

According to the New York Post,

The Los Angeles Dodgers have nixed plans to honor a radical group of “queer and trans nuns” at their upcoming Pride Night — following uproar over the allegedly “blatantly perverted, sexual and disgusting anti-Catholic hate group.”

The baseball team announced earlier this month that it was honoring the local chapter of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence with its annual Community Hero Award next month.

The “nuns” — who have names like Sister T’aint A Virgin, Sister Porn Again and Sister Holly Lewya — were being awarded for supposedly “promoting human rights and respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment.”

On Wednesday, the Dodgers announced they had had a change of heart.

The mainstream media reaction has echoed the response to other recent events like Trump's CNN town hall or the Bud Light boycott: Conservatives Bully L.A. Dodgers Into Dropping Charity Drag Group From Pride Night:

Bowing to pressure from conservatives including Sen. Marco Rubio, the Los Angeles Dodgers announced on Wednesday that they had uninvited an LGBTQ charity and drag performance group from participation in their annual Pride Night. The organization, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, is an order of “queer and trans nuns” devoted to “community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges, and to promoting human rights, respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment,” according to their self-description.

Known for their campy, gender-fluid religious costumes and demonstrations, the Sisters have scandalized Catholics almost from the moment of their inception in 1979. In the Dodgers’ statement, the baseball team alluded to “people who have been offended by the sisters’ inclusion in our evening,” and said that the decision to drop them was made “in an effort not to distract from the great benefits” of the Pride event. The Dodgers’ senior director of public relations declined to comment further.

The sympathetic Wikipedia entry goes to some lengths to characterize the group as an established, non-controversial presence.

The Sisters have grown throughout the U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe, and South America, and are currently organized as an international network of orders, which are mostly non-profit charity organizations that raise money for AIDS, LGBT-related causes, and mainstream community service organizations, while promoting safer sex and educating others about the harmful effects of drug use and other risky behaviors.

Well, scandalizing Catholics isn't so bad, huh? The difficulty arises when Catholics, along with a good many others in the normal distribution, finally say "enough". Right at an inflection point, Bud Light stepped right into Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don't try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

Bud Light thought it would be a great idea to identify its brand with Dylan Mulvaney, and the rest, so far, is history. CNN picked a skinny, unfeminine lady who might as well have been Dylan themself to moderate Trump's CNN town hall. Miller Lite picked a shrill, unfeminine, unfunny "comedian" to scold beer drinkers for liking traditional beer ads. All they did was let the normal distribution pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Suddenly the Dodgers seem to have woken up to what this would do to their brand:

This year, as part of a full night of programming, we invited a number of groups to join us. We are now aware that our inclusion of one group in particular – The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence – in this year’s Pride Night has been the source of some controversy,” the team said.

“Given the strong feelings of people who have been offended by the sisters’ inclusion in our evening, and in an effort not to distract from the great benefits that we have seen over the years of Pride Night, we are deciding to remove them from this year’s group of honorees,” the Dodgers said.

Somebody must have begun to visualize what kind of memes could be made up that included the Dodgers logo and guys in beards and bikinis, and he must have belatedly broken into a cold sweat thinking about what happened to Bud Light.

Latins represent 43 percent of the Dodger fan base, and whatever they may individually feel about Catholic teaching, they will not tolerate disrespect for the Church -- plus there's the other problem with having your brand identified as gay friendly, that some will worry that buying the product, buying the merch, or supporting the team implies you're gay yourself, which Latins by and large don't think is a good idea.

And this all takes place as we're closing in on June, which is Pride Month. It looks like corporate support this year will be muted at best. I feel a great disturbance in the farce.