LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) — The Los Angeles Dodgers are facing mounting backlash after dropping a drag performance and political activism group from the team’s annual Pride Night following opposition from conservative Catholic groups.
On Wednesday, the Dodgers announced the removal the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group who perform and protest for LGBTQ+ causes while dressed satirically as nuns, from their annual Pride event. The Sisters were in line to receive the team’s Community Hero Award during a June 16th game against the San Francisco Giants.
“Given the strong feelings of people who have been offended by the sisters’ inclusion in our evening, and in an effort not to distract from the great benefits that we have seen over the years of Pride Night, we are deciding to remove them from this year’s group of honorees,” the Dodgers said in a statement Wednesday.
On Thursday, following the news that the Sisters had been dropped from the Pride event, L.A. Pride, organizers of the Los Angeles Pride event, the largest in the U.S., announced that they were dropping out of the event as well.
“As a longstanding partner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, we are very disappointed in their decision to rescind their invitation to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to be honored at the 10th annual LGBTQ+ Pride Night. As a result, and in solidarity with our community, LA Pride will not be participating in this year’s Dodgers Pride Night event,” a rep LA Pride said.
Oppositions to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence appearance at Dodgers Stadium came from conservative religious groups, including CatholicVote, who described the sisters as a “Hate Group.”
“They dress in sexualized perversions of religious garb, taunting the women religious who serve the poor in Southern California and around the world. In one infamous stunt, they tricked an archbishop into giving them the Eucharist – the most important sacrament of the Catholic faith – so they could defile it. This past Easter Sunday, the SPI put on an exhibition in San Francisco in which a performer dressed as Jesus carried a cross up a hill and then performed a pole dance on it,” CatholicVote wrote in a letter sent to Major League Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred.
The Sisters were launched in 1979 as a response to the rapidly developing AIDS epidemic, raising money to help care for the sick and spread the gospel of safer sex. Since their launch, the group has since launched new chapters in multiple states and annually raises thousands of dollars that go to support marginalized communities, according to the group.
The group’s mission statement says the organization is devoted to “to community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges, and to promoting human rights, respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment,” and the group claims to use humor and satire to expose the “bigotry, complacency and guilt that chain the human spirit.”
In a statement released following their removal from the Dodgers Pride event, a spokesperson for the Sisters said: “The Sisters are not anti-Catholic, but an organization based on love, acceptance, and celebrating human diversity. To be condemned by representatives of the Catholic Church is particularly ironic, given the organization’s long history of condoning and concealing the sexual abuse of children. It’s a statistical fact that children are less at risk in the company of drag queens than clergy. Yet, the LGBTQ++ communities are consistently targeted by the right because it’s easier to foment fear of the unfamiliar than to take a hard look at the very real threats ranging from gun violence to global warming.”
