And already sports have betrayed me...

Well, so much for my brief sports fandom. As you might recall from my previous post, I had arbitrarily decided that the Tampa Bay Rays would be my first team. As in, I am now a fan. Go sports team!

Above: Sports players playing...I don't know, something? Is this...
Is this even a real sport? Is the internet messing with me?

Pictured: the Pride version of the
team logo. Photo credit: J. J. Abrams

But then today I see this thing about how the team wore pride gear as part of corporate America's annual "pretend to care about the LGBTQIA+ communities" month. Cool, right? Yes, ish. I mean, it was a couple of rainbow patches; one on the hat and one on the jerseys. And, where corporate Pride Month gestures fit on the spectrum between genuine support and crass market-based decisions is certainly up for debate. But I suppose visibility is visibility, right? Well, yes, except for a few team members who refused. For Jesus. Which, I mean, aren't we past this?

Well no. Five players, pitchers all (figures), pulled the rainbow patches off, citing religious reasons. According to one of them with two first names:

Above: Adam, seen here wearing a
cap that is not an affront to God.

"A lot of it comes down to faith...So it's a hard decision. I think a lot of guys decided that it's just a lifestyle that maybe -- not that they look down on anybody or think differently -- it's just maybe we don't want to encourage it if we believe in Jesus, who's encouraged us to live a lifestyle that would abstain from that behavior...

-Jason Adam, Pitcher for the

Tampa Bay Rays, on no homo

My actual face upon reading Adam's nonsense.

"What? I...what?"

-Me, reading that

No, really, what? Ok, couple of things. For one, it's just a logo. Like, if this were Saint Patrick's Day and the team's owners wanted everyone to wear green, would we even be having this conversation. For another, queerness isn't a lifestyle. Are we...are we still having to explain that?

Do you uh...see what I did there?
Incidentally, that's not me in the gif.

Like, Crossfit is a lifestyle, and, for the record, Jesus has as much to say about Crossfit as he does gay stuff. Which is to say squat. Like, I'm no theologian, but I'm pretty sure Jesus doesn't mention homosexuality like, at all. I know because I have access to the internet. That's not to say there isn't anti-gay stuff in the Bible, but there's also stuff about how shellfish is an abomination and parts of it condone slavery.

The point is it's actually not a hard decision. Adam is careful to say "not that there's anything wrong with that" so no one construes his reluctance as homophobia and that's fine. Or at least would be if this were the 1990's and he was on Seinfeld. I mean, no one was asking him to have sex with another man, they were asking him to wear a couple of rainbow patches to show support for a community that has been, and still is (particularly in Florida) the target of hatred, violence, and erasure. So I don't know, suck it up and wear the patch, you know?

"Look, I'm just going to say this one more time: eve-ry-bo-dy.
You have to be good to everybody. Why--why is this so hard?"

-Jesus, just about over this