Editors’ Note:  If you need another excuse not to waste hundreds of dollars for an evening with a game that drags on until your rear end goes numb, simply go to the Diamondback website: click on this link. 

Both of the Editors at The Prickly Pear played baseball and loved baseball. Not so much anymore. Here is our message to the Arizona Diamondbacks:  if you want to inject yourself into politics and the culture wars, don’t expect traditional Americans to support your efforts to sterilize and disfigure children. What confused adults do with their own bodies, and on their own nickel, is their business but we don’t want to support “pride” when the reason we follow baseball is precisely to relax and get away from contentious issues. It would seem “pride” means a whole lot of things ranging from treating homosexuals fairly to subsidizing sex changes for minors and much more, such as men can have babies. Or how about this from the DBACK’S website: “…focused not only on the work experiences of out members of the LGBTQ+ community, but also on the systemic racism currently plaguing the nation and the male hegemony embedded within the sport.”

So, how do you feel DBACK’S fans, you homophobic racists? Is this our hometown baseball team or Antifa speaking to us?

Since the MLB wants to inject itself into these questions, we have a few of our own. Do the DBACKS support destroying women’s sports? Do they support the sexual mutilation of children below the age of consent? What is the DBACK position on men giving birth and chest feeding? Can the DBACKs name one player in the history of the franchise that had a uterus? Has any player or employee for that matter, of the Arizona Diamondbacks not been born from an adult female mother? According to your Director of Scouting, how many sexes are there? Can sexual identifications be changed every inning or only in the off-season? Does your Director of Minor League operations take a position on sex with children under the age of 14? Is it permissible to throw high and inside if the batter is wearing a tutu? Should a drag queen sliding head first wear a glove? We have many other questions but what does any of that have to do with the infield fly rule? Why would baseball ever want to put itself in the position to have to answer such questions? Keep baseball out of politics and gender surgery for minors, or pay the price. With the lousy teams you have fielded in the last years, you will find it even more difficult to fill the seats.

There’s good news, and there’s bad news. The good news is, that the Major League Baseball Texas Rangers “have come under enormous fire from powerful LGBT groups for not giving in and having a Pride night,” National Review’s Nate Hochman said on “Washington Watch.”

Wait a minute, you’re thinking, that sounds bad. How is that good news? Well, it’s good by comparison to the bad news: Every other MLB team (29 out of 30) has hosted a Pride night, and many do so “every single year.” Way to go for the Texas Rangers’ courageous stand against the tsunami of corporate wokeness.

Hochman “spent the last couple of weeks digging into exactly what kinds of LGBT activist groups and medical clinics MLB franchises and teams were funding under the auspices of these LGBT-themed pride nights.”

What he found makes a drag queen story hour seem like “Sesame Street.” For 20 out of the 29 teams, these Pride nights were “funding groups that were either promoting sex changes for children as young as 12 years old or … actually providing them themselves.”

Nothing says baseball like permanently sterilizing children.

Hochman writes:

At least six of those teams promoted or funded organizations that lobby against restrictions on youth sex-change surgeries and for policies such as ‘gender-affirming’ curricula for elementary-school children and ‘trans-inclusive’ K-12 sports.

Five other team Pride Nights promoted or funded groups that provide resources for, and often actively encourage, youth sex changes. Four promoted or funded groups that write referrals for, or partner with, clinics that perform medical gender transitions—either via hormone-altering drugs, sex-change surgeries, or both—on minors.

And finally, five teams have promoted or funded clinics that do drug-induced or surgical youth gender transitions themselves.

Adding insult to injury (or, more precisely, mutilation), Hochman warns, that this transgender slush money is coming straight from ticket sales. It would be bad enough if millionaire athletes dropped a few thousand dollars here and there on terrible political causes. We all expect that. But we don’t expect it when America’s most popular teams from America’s pastime siphon “tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars” straight from ballpark patrons.

Hey, dad, if you bring your son to 20 games this season, we’ll be sure his classmate gets a double mastectomy at 16 for free!

This has got to stop, but how? “Obviously, Major League Baseball is not advertising this,” said “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm, which implies that it’s vulnerable to pressure. In fact, pressure from the transgender lobby forced it into this unconscionable behavior, to begin with.

“Essentially, the LGBT mafia comes and says, ‘Unless you give us money, we’re going to ruin your reputation … but if you give us money, then we’ll just go away quietly,’” suggested Backholm. That character assassination is now targeting the Texas Rangers, the final holdout.

Hochman added that MLB executives could feel pressure from both sides. “Like a lot of corporate leaders, they’re not necessarily far-left ideologues. They’re just driven by incentive structure.”

Currently, their incentives are telling them to fund LGBT groups and Pride nights. “From their perspective, they’re going to get a ton of grief … get threatened by their sponsors … get threatened by powerful activist groups,” he added. “They just figure that it’s less of a headache to fund it.”

The LGBT lobby may have the bases loaded, but conservatives can still escape a blowout by finding a way to end the inning. “It’s up to fans … who basically make up the revenue stream for the MLB, to actually push back and say that this is unacceptable,” Hochman advised. “This is America’s pastime.”

Major League Baseball is “getting away with” this “partially because I think a lot of fans just don’t have time to pay attention.” But the choice is clear: Either fans pay attention, or they’ll inadvertently pay to fund gender-transition surgeries on minors.

Hochman suggested a second prong to operate alongside fan-based pressure, to help restore MLB to its senses; namely, politics. “Ron DeSantis in Florida … demonstrated to Disney that there are going to be political consequences if they try to inflict this stuff on Florida’s children.” Stuck between political and social pressure, baseball teams might just return to playing ball.

The idea is “turning this into an actual movement,” Hochman explained, “that changes the incentive structure for organizations like the MLB, so that they realize that they’re actually going to get more grief from the right and from conservatives than they are going to get from the left and from progressives.”

Building a movement takes time, commitment, and a lot of persuasions. But it’s possible. And, to save a generation of young people from permanent, bodily harm, it’s essential.

*****

This article was published by Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.