Here is the The New York Times columnist:
If I walked onto the field at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and stomped on a Dodger’s uniform on home plate, I hope that the Dodgers and their fans would be upset. This is the jersey that Jackie Robinson wore, along with Dodgers legends like Sandy Koufax, Orel Hershiser, Tommy Lasorda and Roy Campanella. You don’t dishonor other people’s uniforms. In a pluralistic society, decent people don’t dishonor what others find sacred.
This is one reason I think the Dodgers erred in honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence last Friday.
As you might have read, the Sisters are a group of L.G.B.T.Q. activists who have provided invaluable services to those in their community, especially during the AIDS crisis, but who also dress up as over-the-top nuns, adopt names like Sister Mysteria of the Holy Order of the Broken Hymen or Sister Sermonetta of the Flying Phallus, and who have been known to mock the crucifixion by hosting a re-enactment of it as a pole dance.
They are justified in protesting a church whose teaching doesn’t acknowledge their right to be who they are, but they do it in a way that dishonors the nuns who live in poverty serving the poor. They do it in a sophomoric way designed to cause offense. In a healthy society, we try to assert differences without demeaning one another’s identities.
Besides, the Sisters’ methods are counterproductive. L.G.B.T.Q. rights have progressed so far over the past decade or so because members of those communities have displayed their own dignity, not because they’ve denigrated the dignity of others.
The Dodgers were wrong to honor a group that dishonors other people’s uniforms, and the sacred commitments those uniforms represent. But that’s not my real beef with the Dodgers. My real beef is that they should be in the baseball business, not the culture war business. When they cross that boundary, they are eroding something fundamental to a healthy society.
In a healthy society, the early-20th-century Dutch prime minister and theologian Abraham Kuyper observed, there are a variety of spheres, each with its own social function. There is the state, the church, the family, the schools, science, business, the trades, etc. Each of these spheres, he continued, has its own rules and possesses its own integrity and correct way of doing things. Each sphere is a responsible zone of flourishing. You can clarify what any particular sphere’s responsibility is by asking questions like: What is a school for? What is a science lab for? What is a baseball team for?
Read the rest here.
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