Former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard condemned the Los Angeles Dodgers for re-inviting an anti-Catholic group to their annual “Pride Night” Tuesday.
The team initially disinvited the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” (SPI) from their list of honorees after receiving backlash from Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Catholic organizations. The SPI describes themselves as a “leading-edge Order of queer and trans nuns” who often depict Jesus and nuns in sexualized manners and mock Catholics.
The Dodgers released a statement Tuesday disclosing the second invitation sent to this group and offered their “sincerest apologies” to the group and the LGBTQ community.
“It reveals their own hypocrisy and the strength of the fear that is fomented by this cancel culture, where they have to go back on, you know, they rescinded the invitation and they got a lot of hate for it, and they feel like they had to extend it again,” Gabbard said on Fox News’ “Outnumbered.” “The hate that they’re extending not only toward Christians and Catholics, but really the message it is sending to all people of faith is that you don’t matter in this world, you don’t deserve respect, you don’t deserve the same kind of tolerance that these groups and people are demanding.”
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Gabbard then pointed to a scenario where a group mocking Muslims received an invite to participate in the Dodgers’ annual event, claiming there would be outrage from the political left. (RELATED: ‘Indoctrinating Woke Sexual Values’: Tulsi Gabbard Expresses Support For Florida’s Parental Rights Bill)
“People of all of these other faiths, all of a sudden it’s okay to be offensive and make a mockery of and degrade and hate. But can you imagine the outrage from Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib if these people were making a mockery of Islam? It would be a completely different story. It, again, shows the hypocrisy and the double standard of today’s Democratic Party and those who abide by this so-called woke agenda that stands against freedom in this country, and respect.”
CatholicVote, who condemned the initial invite, criticized the team for re-inviting SPI, saying the team “will now celebrate ‘go and sin some more’ anti-Catholic bigotry. This is a slap in the face of every Catholic.”
Rubio wrote a May 16 letter urging the team to revoke its invitation over the group’s “anti-Catholic” bigotry.
“Shamefully, (but not surprisingly) [the Dodgers] have been bullied into apologizing to & ‘re-inviting’ a group of anti-catholic bigots,” Rubio wrote Monday in response to the team’s decision to reinvite the group. “Today our great country is controlled by socio-political ruling elites who don’t just tolerate anti-Christian bigotry, they encourage & celebrate it.”