Another LGBTQ Pride month has come and gone and the Texas Rangers have once again refused to celebrate the LGBTQ community with a promotional game.
The Rangers were the only team in all of Major League Baseball that did not hold some sort of LGBTQ Pride celebration during a game this month as all 29 other teams around the league made an effort to celebrate Pride Month while the Rangers once again refused to do so.
The Rangers have a history of refusing to celebrate the LGBTQ community as the the team has not hosted a promotion to celebrate the LGBTQ+ in over two decades. Back in 2003, the team did invite several LGBTQ+ groups to the ballpark, but it was not officially marketed as any specific promotion and was met with anti-gay protests. The team has not hosted a similar event since, and they don’t appear to have any plans to do so in the future, either.
“With respect to Pride Night, we reached out to the Resource Center and said what can we do internally,” Rangers COO Neil Leibman told The Dallas Morning News back in August of 2020. “We immediately adopted some changes they suggested to be more inclusive in hiring practices. I think that’s more meaningful than just saying ‘OK, we had a Pride Night.’”
Rafael McDonnell, a liaison between pro sports teams and the LGBTQ community’s Dallas-based Resource Center, does not think this is an acceptable stance to take as he points out it’s entirely possible for the team to hold a Pride Night celebration and make meaningful changes in the community.
“If you say, ‘We’re doing one and not the other,’ is where you run into a problem,” McDonnell told The Dallas Morning News back in 2021. “… I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive. I think you can do both.”
At this point, it’s pretty clear that nothing is going to change anytime soon.
