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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.
This should just be filed under yet another case where the dissident right perspective generalizes where the Conservative perspective does not:
Conservatives want to claim that sports shouldn't be political, but the DR understands that everything is political, and the more relevant it is to social consciousness the more political it is inherently.
The Conservatives opposed Kaepernick because he was "bringing politics to sports", the DR opposed Kaepernick because it represented the subversive enshrinement of black grievance against white people in an important public arena.
Now Conservatives are going to do somewhat of an about-face endorsing athletes bringing political controversy to sports, whereas the DR can support the protest for the exact same reasoning it opposed the Kaepernick protests.
So, the DR perspective can defend Reimer and oppose Kaepernick for an internally consistent reason. Conservatives cannot because they continue to deny that these symbolically meaningful conflicts are real, they constantly want to say "it's not about race" or "it's not about opposing the LGBT movement" when these controversies are very much about those things.
I think “conservatives” could be logically consistent about bringing politics into supports with one caveat
Thru this logic Kap added politics where there was none. And Reimer didn’t add politics it was the nhl adding politics by forcing him to be pro-pride politics.
As long as the anthem isn’t politics then theirs no logical issue with the conservative position. They just scold the NHL for adding politics.
Okay, that’s fine, but it does mean that conservatives had a pretty massive blind spot that they hadn’t even tried to consider very deeply, doesn’t it? You’d have to be a special sort of blinkered not to look at the actual semantic content of the National Anthem itself - not to mention the larger constellation of military- and state-affirming symbology which surrounds the presentation of the anthem at a sporting event - a presentation that very often includes not only the physical presence of active-duty military personnel but also a fly-over by genuine military-grade aircraft - and think, “This doesn’t contain any ideological content about citizens’ relationship with their government.”
This is what so frustrated me during the whole Kaepernick situation, because like every other American here, I was around during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and I saw firsthand the consequences of just rubber-stamping everything your government and your military decide to do. (“They’re fighting for our freedom,” etc.) I would have thought, naïvely, that maybe conservatives would have at least developed some awareness that there is actual political/ideological content behind all the flag-waving patriotic stuff, but apparently even all these years later they’re still using the patriotic symbolism as a license to turn off the analytical part of their brains entirely and fall back on “none of this is political, I just want to grill.”
To be clear, pride is the exact same thing from the left- progressives claim it’s not political, it’s just that some people oppose it because they’re bigots.
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