Baseball cap wars: Can the biblical rainbow coexist with a Pride Night rainbow?

After the great flood in the Book of Genesis, God offered a timeless symbol of hope.

The Bible says God promised: "I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever … the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life."

Nevertheless, clashing rainbow symbols recently created a storm in Major League Baseball when powers wielded by team owners clashed with the religious beliefs of players.

The big question: Can the biblical rainbow coexist on the same Pride Night baseball cap with the today's rainbow celebrating LGBTQ+ rights?

This controversy raised legitimate First Amendment issues, but also helped clarify the workplace rights of employers, said Hal Frampton, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom and director of the group's Center for Conscience Initiatives.

The clash between MLB leaders and several San Francisco Giants pitchers "was about both issues, really," he said, reached by telephone. "It was about not being discriminated against" in the workplace, especially if there were questions about whether an employer was "enforcing a rule consistently," or only enforcing it when there was "religious expression that was seen as troublesome" to employers.

The firestorm began when Giants starting pitcher Landen Roupp, along with relievers J.T. Brubaker and Ryan Walker, wrote Bible verse references -- variations on Genesis 9: 12-16 -- next to the rainbow logo on their Pride Night caps. Relief pitcher Sam Hentges chose to wear his standard black-and-orange Giants cap, without the rainbow logo.

U.S. bishops wrestle with 'Eucharistic coherence,' a topic that mixes politics and doctrine

Archbishop Salvatore Joseph Cordileone leads the Archdiocese of San Francisco, a symbolic city in debates about modern American culture.

But what matters the most, as tensions rise among Catholic leaders, is that Cordileone is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's hometown bishop. Thus, it's hard for politicos to avoid blunt passages in his new pastoral letter, "Before I Formed You in the Womb I Knew You."

Citing centuries of church doctrine, the archbishop argued that Catholics who "reject the teaching of the Church on the sanctity of human life and those who do not seek to live in accordance with that teaching should not receive the Eucharist. It is fundamentally a question of integrity: to receive the Blessed Sacrament in the Catholic liturgy is to espouse publicly the faith and moral teachings of the Catholic Church, and to desire to live accordingly."

There is, he added, "a great difference between struggling to live according to the teachings of the Church and rejecting those teachings. … In the case of public figures who profess to be Catholic and promote abortion, we are not dealing with a sin committed in human weakness or a moral lapse: this is a matter of persistent, obdurate and public rejection of Catholic teaching. This adds an even greater responsibility to the role of the Church's pastors in caring for the salvation of souls."

Citing a famous example, Cordileone recalled when former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani received Holy Communion during a 2008 Mass led by Pope Benedict XVI. This caused scandal and, according to the late Cardinal Edward Egan, violated an agreement that Giuliani would not receive the Sacrament because of his public support for abortion rights and other clashes with doctrine.

The big issue, as U.S. bishops prepare for June discussions of "Eucharistic coherence," is not how to handle a former New York City mayor. The question is whether bishops can address their own divisions about the status of pro-abortion-rights Catholics such as Pelosi and President Joe Biden. While vice president, Biden also performed two same-sex marriage rites.

San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy, firing back at Cordileone in America magazine, stressed that the "Eucharist must never be instrumentalized for a political end. … But that is precisely what is being done in the effort to exclude Catholic political leaders who oppose the church's teaching on abortion and civil law. The Eucharist is being weaponized and deployed as a tool in political warfare. This must not happen."

Meanwhile, the prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned the leader of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that these issues could become a "source of discord rather than unity within the episcopate" and among all American Catholics.