Faculty of Social Science

Pride-themed sporting events have become commonplace in North American men’s professional sports leagues. These events were introduced with a simple message: LGBTQ+ fans belong in sports. Opposition to them is nothing new – pushback against Pride Nights stretches back at least to 2022 – but it has escalated over the past few years. Most recently, three San Francisco Giants pitchers wrote Bible verses on their Pride Night hats in an apparent protest against the team’s Pride Night, while a fourth player wore the standard cap instead. No player or uniformed staff is required to wear them, but Major League Baseball (MLB) has a longstanding ban on players or uniformed staff writing statements of any kind of their cap or uniform. The league cited the rule when it warned the pitchers in a decision that drew a Department of Justice inquiry into the MLB response. All this has left major sports organizations with the question of what to do next.  

Why have they become controversial?

Objections to Pride Nights are nothing new. In 2022, five Tampa Bay Rays players refused to wear Pride-themed jerseys. The following year brought a much larger wave in the NHL: players including Eric and Marc Staal, Ivan Provorov and James Reimer refused to wear Pride-themed warmup jerseys on religious grounds, which eventually pushed the league to ban “specialty” jerseys and stick tape. The NHL reversed the stick tape ban weeks later after players, including Connor McDavid, objected. In 2025, Clayton Kershaw, then a Dodgers pitcher, wrote the same Genesis 9:12-16 reference on his cap that would appear on Giants caps a year later. Genesis 9:12-16 recounts God’s covenant with Noah after the flood in which the rainbow is offered as a sign of mercy and a promise never again to destroy the Earth. Its use is widely seen as an attempt to “reclaim” the rainbow symbol from the LGBTQ+ movement rather than a direct scriptural argument against it.  

How Pride nights emerged

The San Francisco Giants held one of the first known LGBTQ-supportive nights in professional sports in 1994 with their “Until There’s a Cure Day,” an HIV/AIDS awareness event. Many Giants fans referenced this event after the Giants players Bible verse controversy. The Los Angeles Dodgers hosted what’s widely considered the first formal Pride Night in September 2000, born out of controversy: a lesbian couple, Danielle Goldey and Meredith Kott, had been ejected from Dodger Stadium that August for kissing, and the team’s apology and outreach to LGBTQ groups led directly to “Gay and Lesbian Night at Dodger Stadium.” The Dodgers did not hold a yearly Pride night again until 2013. That same year, the Florida Panthers held the NHL’s first Pride Night, decking out their arena in rainbow colours. By the 2022-23 season, roughly half the NHL’s teams had players wearing rainbow-themed jerseys during warmups. The WNBA became the first U.S. professional league to market to the LGBTQ+ community by launching a dedicated Pride campaign in May 2014. That visibility has since become part of the WNBA’s product itself: about one-quarter of players are publicly out as LGBTQ+. Support for the LGBTQ+ community has become an important policy for fans, players, coaches and executives. The NBA hosted its first Pride Night in 2016, when the Portland Trail Blazers and Milwaukee Bucks both held events. The league rode a float in the New York City Pride Parade that same year. The NFL lagged furthest behind. The Washington Football Team, now the Commanders, didn’t hold the league’s first Pride Night until September 2021 and several teams still do not host one. Across leagues, what emerged was a tone aimed at fostering goodwill and inclusion through celebration. Many teams now hold yearly Pride Nights as an act of corporate social responsibility to attract fans who may have previously felt excluded from professional sports’ hetero-normative environment and marketing.  

A wider political pushback

Conservative media figures and lawmakers, including Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, seized on the episode as supposed proof that MLB was policing Christian expression, folding it into the same culture-war framework long used against transgender athletes. That framework is a symbolic fight over fairness and biology that reliably mobilizes a conservative base even when, as with transgender participation in sports, the number of athletes actually involved is small. Pride Nights do not not threaten the ability of other fans to support their team. Yet sporting events provide a captive audience for talking points about gender in modern society. The attention conservative commentators have given the Giants controversy also fits a broader pattern during U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, as inclusive sporting environments built up over three decades face resistance. MLB removed references to “diversity” from its careers website in March 2025 in response to a federal executive order. The NFL also paused its Accelerator Program, created in 2022 to increase diversity in coaching and front-office hiring, in 2025 before reinstating it in May 2026 with non-minority participants included for the first time. That same political current has reached the sport world’s highest governing body. The International Olympic Committee has banned transgender women and athletes with Differences of Sex Development from competing in the female category. Similar bans have also taken place in the U.S., United Kingdom and Alberta. It appears sport is once again becoming more hostile towards historically marginalized community members, with conservative commentators leading a push for a retrenchment of sport’s heteronormative norms.  

What leagues should take from this

If a baseball team devoting one of its 81 home games to a Pride Night causes this much backlash, sports leagues clearly still have work to do to build acceptance of LGBTQ+ people in their spaces. Left unaddressed, this kind of moment risks reducing three decades of work building inclusive sporting environments to just another flashpoint for polarization. Scaling back Pride programming and rainbow iconography would be a major misstep. It would concede ground to the stigmas and hatred sports teams like the very same San Francisco Giants tried to combat during the HIV/AIDs pandemic in the 1990s. It would undo 30 years of progress in making sports environments more inclusive. If four members of a 26-player team do not want to wear a rainbow logo, that is their right, and they can wear their normal cap instead. But leagues like MLB should not follow the NHL’s earlier example and strip away Pride uniforms altogether. Doing so would obscure the fact that the majority of players still wear Pride night gear, and reflect the progress that has been made in making sports environments more inclusive. Pride Nights may not be able to deliver complete acceptance. But they can keep the door to inclusion open long enough for more of that work to continue. Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven, PhD Candidate, Political Science, Western University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Expert Insight reflects the perspective and scholarly interest of Western faculty members and is not an articulation of official university policy on issues being addressed.