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Well, it finally happened. Last Saturday San Jose Sharks goaltender James Reimer, citing religious beliefs, refused to wear the Pride-themed warmup jersey in honor of Pride night, and accordingly sat out warmups. Reimer has started most of San Jose's games this season but has mostly been splitting time with Kaapo Kahkonen, but he did not start Saturday and instead was Kahkonen's backup. This isn't the first time this season that the Pride jerseys have led to controversy—Ivan Provorov of the Philadelphia Flyers declined to wear it back in January, citing his Russian Orthodox faith, and Pride nights were cancelled in New York and Minnesota (presumably because the refusals would be conspicuous enough to cause undue controversy, but I have no evidence of this). So it's been simmering for a while, but this was the first real big blowup. Getting mad at Russians for having "incorrect" beliefs doesn't get much traction (Ovechkin's support of Putin was never that big a deal) because it's presumed that they aren't exactly the most enlightened people. And individual teams cancelling events seems suspect but teams are already too easy to get mad at for a variety of reasons, though people certainly took advantage of the opportunity. But now, with Reimer, and Anglo Protestant. conservatives finally have their Colin Kaepernick.
Reaction was predictable. The Fox News comment section duly praised Reimer for his courage to stand up against the wokeness that has come to infect professional sports. Reddit, meanwhile, seemed disgusted that the NHL would allow one of its players to openly flaunt the ideals of inclusiveness. There was also a quite a bit of armchair theologizing, with people who almost assuredly aren't religious either making fun of religion wholesale or claiming that, actually, Reimer's faith should make him an LGBT ally. Nearly absent from this conversation, though, is Kaepernick, despite the obvious parallels. Conservatives had previously argued that "politics should be kept out of sports", and that Kaepernick's nonparticipation in a team-oriented civic ritual was tantamount to injecting his own politics into the game. Even Mike Tomlin's decision to keep the Steelers in the tunnel in an attempt to avoid controversy that may have resulted from a player kneeling backfired; participation was mandatory, and Alejandro Villenueva was praised as a folk hero for conspicuously entering the field anyway to stand for the anthem. Ditto liberals, who also failed to see that the idea of punishing a player for refusing to participate in a pregame activity because it was against his religious or political beliefs is something that extends across the board; we can't pick and choose which beliefs are okay to protest and which aren't. The only real difference is that conservatives seem to believe that Pride nights are an abomination that has to go, while I never heard any serious Kaepernick supporters suggest that the NFL should do away with the anthem.
What's surprising is the lack of self-awareness. It's not that people in these comments sections don't challenge people with the obvious Kaepernick comparisons, it's that no one seems willing to even engage. I have yet to see anyone on either side make a statement about consistency (i.e. I defended Kaepernick and I defend Reimer/I criticized Kaepernick and I'm criticizing Reimer) or attempt to differentiate the situations. People usually try to differentiate because they want to appear principled and not just reacting based on their own biases, but most controversies give a little room for it. The Kaepernick case is so familiar and so alike that it's almost as if the cognitive dissonance actively prevents people from engaging. I'd like to see one person try to justify their position in light of this argument. Just one.
False equivalence. Standing up for the national anthem is culturally universal phenomenon, common to all countries and ideologies. Wearing symbols of the LGBTQ+ pride movement isn't the majority position in the US, let alone the world.
Nationalism isn't universal, let alone being for the national anthem of your (again, not a universal sentiment) country.
I'm sure there's some Irishmen who don't feel too kindly about the national anthem of the United Kingdom, for example. To this day iirc there are elected Sinn Fein members that'll never sit in government cause they can't accept the trappings of the UK government.
Sinn Fein politicians are perfectly happy to stand respectfully for God Save the King in accordance with international protocol when it is played at an international sports game, or on other appropriate civic occasions like the arrival or departure of a senior official visitor from the United Kingdom.
Part of the confusion is the weirdness of Americans putting on a patriotic display at bog-standard pro sports games. In the culture that is non-American pro sports (most obviously including European league football) it would be a presumptively inappropriate political statement to play the national anthem before a game. Similarly, it would be obviously inappropriate to protest a national anthem before a game between national teams, because it is being used to designate a country and not to make a political point.
Yet this is what the American Womens Soccer Team did. So I don't think your reasoning explains what motivates those who disrespect the Star Spangled Banner.
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That doesn’t make them not nationalists. Quite the opposite. They just aren’t nationalistic about the flag of the State they are living in, and would prefer another State to run that area
It's not really the problem here. The problem is that they are anti-nationalist of the universally recognized flag of the nation that holds the country - just as the US flag is universally recognized as the flag of the current government holding sway over those territories.
They are showing the same "disrespect" that Kaep showed. Point is that that "respect" is not universal at all.
Basically you can't lean on some descriptive fact about flag popularity here; you just have to make a normative case that it's wrong to dismiss the national flag relative to other (less practically relevant in some cases) alternatives.
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