Loving the Yankees, For All the Right Reasons

I BECAME A YANKEE (American baseball team) fan, in 1961, when I was six. My parents hated them, my neighbors hated them, it seemed the whole world hated them, so, being the precocious little social protester do gooder that I was already emerging into, I decided "hey, this is my team". I felt sorry for them; the Yankees were obviously the underdog, and were getting no love. By the time I was old enough to learn the truth, it was too late. I've never been ashamed to be a Yankee fan, and in fact have enjoyed the animosity generated by it and by living in the Midwest. Baseball argument are the best. They're harmless, notwithstanding the occasional barroom brawl and gun fight, since everything is settled on the field, in plain sight. I have never been prouder of them than now. Just recently, in concert with the fiftieth anniversary of the famous "Stonewall" incident, in which a gay bar in New York was attacked by police and the publicity resulting therefrom is widely credited with having engendered the gay right movement, the Yankees, at Yankee stadium, with forty five thousand in attendance, honored the LGBTQ community. It was LGBTG night at the big ball park in the Bronx. I do not know the details. I do know that there were people on the filed before the game, standing in a row at home plate, shaking hands and holding commemorative plaques and trophies. All the talk was about the Stonewall event. The crowd seemed generally amenable to it all. New York, like almost all big American cities, is full of liberals, and one can presume that it was largely a liberal gathering at the stadium. Yankee fans, however, abound all across the fruited plain, and it can be surmised that quite a few sixty year old right wing extreme Trump supporter lifelong Yankee fans turned in their membership cards in disgust that night. fine, Screw them. For that matte, screw everyone who hates the Yankees because they have and spend a lot of money on their baseball team; so do all the other teams, just not quite as much. the Yankees are the third most valuable sports franchise on the free market, behind Manchester United soccer, and Dallas Cowboy football. America loves winners, and the word "Yankee' means "American", so, what's not to love? The ownership of the team, the Steinbrenner family, must have thought long and hard about honoring LGBTQ folks, and the fact that they decided to go ahead with it attests to our changing times, to the Yankees ownership brilliance, and to liberal New York. The event might not have flown in Atlanta. Whether our conservative evangelical Christian Trump people like it or not, and they don't, LGBTQ people are going to gain social equality in America, because they and their millions of friends are insisting on it Gay people, transgender people, and all other kinds of unusual people are not sick, they are not sinners, and they are not criminals, though until recently they were so categorized by the American justice system. But,as Thomas Jefferson is reputed to have said, though it does not appear in his writings: "When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty". So, as far as justice is concerned, social justice, you right wing evangelical christian Trumper hypocritical moral and intellectual bankrupt reprobates can kiss some gay ass, and some bi-sexual ass to boot, which they would probably enjoy, and watch the Yankees win, while the ball club, with its forty thousand in house spectators per game paying exorbitant ticket prices laughs all the way to the bank, and to Stonewall and back to the Bronx.