The Morning Briefing: You Will Be Forced to Care—Gay Hockey Edition

Happy Monday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Grayson just wanted to wear his festive fuchsia pantaloons and sing sea shanties in Norwegian without being judged.

The Pride Police are on the prowl again, this time in the National Hockey League.

One of the more tedious aspects of the woke crusade for “inclusivity” is that we now have to be bombarded with radical messaging in what used to be escapist activities, like sports fandom. Hardcore sports fans like me watch games to get away from the regular world for a while. We don’t want to be preached to.

About anything. I don’t even care if it’s something I support, I don’t want it polluting my gametime.

But the pollution is happening, much to the chagrin of those of us who find it difficult to break our sports addictions.

The latest heavy hand of wokeness has fallen upon the NHL, and it perfectly illustrates all that is wrong with the overwrought efforts to make us care. Robert covered it for us:

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, of all places, the National Hockey League (NHL), as an increasing number of players are daring to express thoughts different from those that our self-anointed moral superiors wish them to think. It’s glorious to behold, but how long it will last before league officials bring the hammer down is anyone’s guess.

ESPN reported, no doubt amid loud expressions of rage and disgust among its editors, that the NHL’s New York Rangers “did not wear Pride Night jerseys or use rainbow stick tape during warmups on Friday night, despite promoting them in ticket sales materials leading up to the game.”

As Robert goes onto explain, there was Pride messaging throughout the game, it just wasn’t done the way it was demanded. This is how these things always play out. There is no level of capitulation that is satisfactory for those who want to be permanently aggrieved. It’s not just that we will be made to care, but that we’ll be made to care with rules that are ever-changing.

The major sports leagues don’t get that. Nor do well-meaning, but stupid, politicians on the right. They’re Charlie Brown and the woke Pride mob is Lucy pulling the football away.

This is all so ridiculous. Pride and hockey go together like, well, nothing. This was my reaction when I first read about it yesterday:

Transphobia! Exclusion! Whatever!

Like all things leftist, this a setup to silence any and all dissent from prog orthodoxy. They’re relentless. Rick wrote a post the other day about the “inclusive” Pride movement’s ongoing attempts to ruin the life of Masterpiece Cakeshop’s Jack Phillips. This is who the activist left really is. Obey or perish. They’re the real exclusionists.

I’m not “phobic” about anything but heights.

I am, however, anti-bully.

That’s the real problem here.