The Los Angeles Dodgers have backtracked so fast on their plan to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence that you might not have even been aware of the controversy. To kick off “Pride Month” (are you ready? Only two weeks left!), the fabled franchise of Vin Scully, Sandy Koufax, and Tommy Lasorda was going to bestow its annual Community Hero Award upon that notorious “order of queer and trans nuns”—a loosely organized international association of cross-dressing men whose garish faux habits, names like “Sister Penny Costal” and “Sister Risqué of the Sissytine Chapel,” and shameless appropriation of Catholic terms and imagery bear vivid witness to the devil’s insatiable desire to mock and pervert the good.
Thanks to the Catholic organizations, politicians, influencers, and ordinary folk who quickly registered their opposition to that plan, the Dodgers backed down almost immediately. Their halfhearted press release, though, made clear that they weren’t disavowing the “sisters”—either for their deviance or their offensiveness toward Catholics—but merely wished “not to distract” from celebrating Pride. (One wonders how the execs at Big Blue would have reacted to a planned honoree being revealed as a Holocaust denier or an organizer of Let’s Draw Mohammed contests.)
“Pride” celebrations, though, will go on apace, having become an obligatory fixture in corporate and popular culture, with ever-increasing demands for gestures of “allyship” with the rainbow acronym. Short of some unforeseen major social upheaval, there seems to be no un-ringing that bell.
Which should lead us to wonder: would this be the case today if, a decade or three ago, enough Catholics had managed to summon the same level of opposition now being displayed over a baseball team giving a plaque to some petty blasphemers in lipstick and hose? What if we had not waited to draw the line at drag nuns (or Bud Lite cans) but had objected with a firm voice to all “pride” events in stadiums, libraries, parks, and the rest? What if we had said no to mandatory “sexual diversity” training in the workplace? What if we had shown the courage, with one voice from the top ranks of the clergy to the back pews of the parish, to risk the world’s ire and testify to the truth about sex, marriage, and human nature?
It’s easy, in hindsight, to say that we didn’t realize how far things would go. Perhaps some thought they were being virtuously merciful or non-judgmental. Maybe others believed that a policy of appeasement on the little things would create a long-term peaceful compromise. But apart from that being a losing strategy—our keeping quiet about the rainbow flag at the courthouse didn’t deter future LBGTQ extremism but encouraged it—it also reveals an inversion of our priorities.
Simply put, shouldn’t we care more about the relatively mild and relatively tolerable examples of normalizing the gay subculture than we do about the outlier extremists? The campy outrages of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence may get our blood rising; but God has been mocked before and will continue to be mocked until the end of time, at which point he will settle accounts himself. Far more grievous to us should be the millions of souls who get trapped in snares of sexual confusion and misery because our laws, our schools, our media, and our institutions taught them it was good. Because we let them teach it.