Global Courant
The Sisters have been at the forefront of LGBTQ rights activism for decades. The group began organizing in the 1970s to support people living with HIV/AIDS.
In the end, the Sisters received a Community Hero Award in a brief on-field ceremony with few fans left in their seats before Friday’s Dodgers game against rivals San Francisco Giants.
The invitation infuriated many conservative Catholics, even at the highest levels of the American hierarchy.
On Monday, Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and President of the American Conference of Catholic Bishops Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, joined in a statement called it offensive and a mockery.
The statement did not refer to the Dodgers by name, but rather to a professional baseball team. They asked Catholics to pray on Friday “as an act of reparation for the blasphemies against our Lord that we see in our culture today.”
The Phoenix-based Catholics for Catholics organized what they called “a praying procession” and had discouraged people from bringing children to the rally because it expected anti-Christian protesters to have “hostility,” The Associated Press reported.
But there were no disturbances or arrests during the protests, which stretched from the stadium’s main entrance to Vin Scully Avenue before the game, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department said.
A man with a megaphone repeated “Hail Mary, full of grace” and a prayer, and at one point the entrance was closed, with a chain link rolled over it and police vehicles present, but it later reopened. It wasn’t clear why. Police had no information and the Dodgers did not respond to a request for comment.
Others basked in the event. That’s what a man who attended the game told me NBC Los Angeles that it mattered that the team honored LGBTQ issues.
“My team supports me and I want to show my support,” he said. “I think they (protesters) have their right, but today is like a special day for us. Mainly because we are not respected much – especially for LGBT and for the Dodgers team to support us.”
The Sisters’ invitation, initially extended by the Dodgers in May, drew backlash, including an appeal from Major League Baseball Senator Marco Rubio, R-Florida.
In his letter to the league, Rubio called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence an “anti-Catholic” group whose members “mock the faith” and encourage “perversion of Jesus’ commandment to ‘go and sin no more’ .”
The Dodgers’ turnaround didn’t put things to rest. Equality California, an LGBT civil rights group, said the team “should be ashamed”.
LA Pride, which organizes the huge LA Pride Parade & Festival, among other things, said it was disappointed not to participate in the Dodgers’ planned Pride event.
Pride is a fight for equality and inclusion for the entire LGBTQ+ community and we are not going to stop now.
Among those who disagreed with the Dodgers’ decision to host the Sisters was the team’s own star pitcher, three-time National League Cy Young Award winner Clayton Kershaw.
Kershaw told the Los Angeles Times at the end of May that he did not agree to make fun of other people’s religions. The left-hander told the newspaper that his opposition to the ceremony was not against the LGBTQ community, but only against honoring the sisters.
“This has nothing to do with the LGBTQ community or Pride or anything like that,” Kershaw told The Times. “This is just a group mocking a religion that I don’t agree with.”
The Dodgers apologized to the Sisters on May 22, as well as the LGBTQ community at large, and re-invited the group.
It said it changed course “after much thoughtful feedback from our diverse communities, honest conversations within the Los Angeles Dodgers organization, and generous discussions with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.”
Many of the signs at the protest against Friday’s event were about insults to the Catholic faith, according to video footage from the crime scene.
But the Dodgers’ controversy comes after some companies have been targeted by conservatives and others for ads or merchandise featuring transgender people and issues.
Bud Light was the target of a boycott after partnering with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a social media ad, and Target removed some merchandise from its Pride collection in May after the retailer said its employees were threatened.
