Could our society-wide obeisance to the Left’s pet causes finally be ending? It’s early yet to identify any trends, but there are tantalizing signs that a springtime of sanity could be on the horizon. National Hockey League (NHL) commissioner Gary Bettman has revealed that the league is actually considering dropping Pride Nights. The idolatry of the LGBTQ movement is still very much with us, but this is a significant sign that the ice could be melting.
The Daily Caller reported Wednesday that in a recent interview, Bettman spoke openly about how the league was planning to “evaluate” whether or not Pride Nights would continue. In even going this far, Bettman became the first head of any major sports league and the first pop culture figure anywhere even to question the wisdom of constantly celebrating what every culture and religion everywhere in all of human history considered to be perversion and degeneracy. That’s not to say, of course, that Bettman was daring to make any moral judgments; he was just seeing the writing on the wall after widespread revolts within the NHL against having to burn incense to the Left’s gods.
In a reminder of the difference that one courageous individual can make, Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov started it all off in January when he refused to don the Flyers’ special rainbow gear for Pride Night, explaining that to do so would go against his Russian Orthodox faith. “I respect everyone. I respect everybody’s choices,” Provorov explained. “My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion.”
Provorov opened the floodgates. Shortly after he took his stand, the New York Rangers declined to wear their Pride Night jerseys, and then the New York Islanders, Chicago Blackhawks, and Minnesota Wild followed suit. The Daily Caller adds that “the San Jose Sharks’ James Reimer, Buffalo Sabres’ Ilya Lybushkin, and Florida Panthers’ brothers Marc and Eric Staal also didn’t participate in their team’s Pride Nights.”
Bettman had to acknowledge the turning of the tide. “This is the first time we’ve experienced that,” he said with admirable understatement, “and I think it’s something that we’re going to have to evaluate in the offseason. This is one issue where players for a variety of reasons may not feel comfortable wearing the uniform as a form of endorsement.” Indeed, and that has always been true; it took just one player with courage, Ivan Provorov, to enable the other dissidents in the league to find spine enough to take their own stand.
Accordingly, Bettman found himself taking a stand for the individual conscience that he never would have even contemplated taking had it not been for Provorov. “But I think that’s become more of a distraction now,” he said of Pride Night, “because the substance of what our teams and we have been doing and stand for is really being pushed to the side for what is a handful of players basically have made personal decisions, and you have to respect that as well.” Yes, you do. You never had to before, but now that it’s clear that if you keep pushing Leftist lunacy on sane people, you’re not going to have any hockey players left (or any spectators, for that matter), you’re singing a different tune.
The Left professes to cherish diversity, but the diversity it has in mind is one of people of all races, genders (all seventy-two of them), and cultures saying and doing and thinking the same things. It most emphatically does not involve any diversity of thought or disagreement from the Leftist line on anything. But genuine diversity is breaking out in the NHL, and it’s all thanks to Ivan Provorov.
If we had a society that had any respect for individual rights and the courage of a man in the face of an immoral and hateful force that could easily destroy his professional career, the NHL would be holding Ivan Provorov Night instead of Pride Night. That isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but Provorov’s willingness to stand and take the heat may have sounded the death knell for Pride Nights in general, and in these days of increasing transgender threats and violence, that would be a tremendous boon for society in itself.
Go ahead, Mr. Bettman. Follow through and axe the Pride Night celebrations. Leftists may scream for a while, but then they will go on to the next outrage, and you can return to what you should have been focusing on all along — the hockey game.
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