Under pressure to recognize “Pride Night” at Dodge Stadium, someone in the corporate office thought it would be a good idea to recognize men dressed in drag who pretend to be Catholic nuns. So the baseball franchise planned to give a Community Hero Award to the group Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
That idea did not go over well, especially among Catholics, since the Dodgers team planned to praise a group that mocks Christ’s birth and parodies the Way of the Cross, the traditional hand-crossing gesture.
In a fiery letter to the Dodgers front office, CatholicVote president Brian Burch said “Sisters” mocked Jesus Christ as recently as Easter. A drag performer, dressed as Jesus, carried a stripper pole up a hill then danced, he wrote.
Burch was likely referring to an annual faith-mocking event in San Francisco's Dolores Park. A pre-Easter article by the Bay Area Reporter excitedly announced the "beloved" Sisters was returning for its annual Easter party, which included an Easter egg hunt for kids and an adults-only "Hunky Jesus" contest.
“We sincerely doubt,” Burch further wrote, “that the Dodgers would give such an award to a group which made a similar travesty of the Jewish faith or Muslim faith.”
Facing that kind of backlash, the Dodgers retreated.
“Given the strong feelings of people who have been offended by the sisters’ inclusion in our evening,” a team statement reads, “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.”
Greg Burt of the California Family Council tells AFN the Dodgers must have realized the city is still filled with “devout Catholics” who are also devoted Dodgers fans.
“And if you invite and want to honor a group that spends all its time mocking Catholics,” he says, “you have to assume some Catholic viewers are going to be upset.”
Even though inviting “Sisters” had made little news in liberal newsrooms, disinviting the Catholic-mocking group caused an uproar. The team was criticized in articles by The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, CBS News, and CNN for disinviting the immoral drag queens. At least two homosexual groups refused to attend Pride Night, too, and numerous local and state politicians claimed they were outraged by the reversal.
“I am truly disappointed that our beloved LA Dodgers have given in to their manufactured outrage,” Rick Zbur, a state assemblyman and homosexual activist, complained about the group whose motto is “go and sin some more.”
