SF Giants, Farhan Zaidi are wrong to run from the politics of Pride Day

Farhan Zaidi said the SF Giants LGBTQIA+ Pride Day was "not a political issue." Our Marc Delucchi disagrees and calls for Zaidi to embrace the political.

The SF Giants celebrated LGBTQIA+ Pride at Oracle Park last weekend. During a guest appearance on KNBR's Tolbert and Copes on Thursday, Zaidi took a moment to highlight the organization's celebration. At one point in his discussion of the event, Zaidi took a moment to say that Pride is not political to the Giants organization.

"There's been so much in professional sports about, you know, political stuff, and to me, to the Giants organization, this is not a political issue,” Zaidi said. “Celebrating pride is about love, support, understanding, and (I’m) just really proud of our organization and our players, the way they conducted themselves.”

If you've read the headline of this article, you know I disagree with Zaidi's statement here. However, I want to clarify where I am coming from with my criticism. Zaidi and Giants manager Gabe Kapler have been consistently supportive of LGBTQIA+ inclusion in MLB, something that cannot be said for many other prominent people in the league.

I'm not sure if it's worth an article on its own, but I wanted to highlight Gabe Kapler's full comments from pregame today on the #SFGiants Pride Celebration today: pic.twitter.com/w2QGIbCFKP

— Marc Delucchi (@maddelucchi) June 10, 2023

Earlier this week, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said the league has instructed teams to stop incorporating pro-LGBTQIA+ symbols into their uniforms as pride celebrations.

“We have told teams," Manfred said, "in terms of actual uniforms, hats, bases that we don’t think putting logos on them is a good idea just because of the desire to protect players: not putting them in a position of doing something that may make them uncomfortable because of their personal views.”

Manfred's comments are clear, his MLB prioritizes the values of anti-LGBTQIA+ hate groups over LGBTQIA+ people. For the Giants' president of baseball operations and manager to be as adamant as they have been in the opposite direction is something worthy of praise.

However, as one of LGBTQIA+ people's most prominent potential allies in the sport, it's important to hold people like Zaidi to a high standard. If he had said that Pride celebrations are not up for debate in the Giants organization, that would have been a powerful political statement. Instead, he muddled the organization's message by relenting politics to those targeting LGBTQIA+ people.

Politics are not good or bad. Politics are simply a reality of the world. All of our actions are political. From choosing between public, charter, or private schools for our children to deciding whether to collectively organize in a union at work. And yes, the choice to respect, support, and empower LGBTQIA+ people is political.

The United States' collective disdain for the idea of politics comes from a cultural prioritization of the status quo. There is a great tension in America between the mythical idea that a perfect country was founded in 1776 and the reality, which features slavery, indigenous genocide, sexist restrictions on women's suffrage and autonomy, lynchings, Japanese internment, Jim Crow laws, empowering brutal dictators throughout the world, delaying a response to the HIV crisis, and mass incarceration amidst a seemingly endless list of atrocities.

Politics were on both sides of all of those horrors. Politics are on both sides of the fight for LGBTQIA+ people's rights, safety, and joy.

There's a deeper conversation about pinkwashing to be had about the Giants Pride Celebrations, particularly given principal owner Charles B. Johnson's consistent support of political candidates who promote LGBTQIA+ hate. As Frankie de la Cretaz explained in a piece for AndScape on sports and pinkwashing, Pride celebrations at pro sporting events are often hollow and leave a lot to be desired. Pride itself exists because of the necessary violent political action in the Stonewall uprising, something these events rarely engage with.

Pride began as a riot by queer and trans folks of color who were sick of being harassed and killed by the system. Yet, by refusing to acknowledge that the same forces are still at play, Pride Nights fall flat because they don’t actually do anything to advocate for the real change that queer and trans folks need to be truly safe.

Still, the Giants explicitly recognizing the existence and identities of queer people in the context of MLB is noteworthy in the modern social climate. A significant portion of the United States' population, which is overrepresented among American MLB players, opposes the existence of queer people. Over the past few years, as the GOP has become more unhinged in its attacks on LGBTQIA+ people, hate crimes against queer folks and communities have spiked as well.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention raised a Red Flag Alert in March, noting a "widespread pattern of genocidal language and policies being used by political actors in the USA against the transgender community."

Whether Zaidi likes it or not, the Giants Pride Day was political. If he embraces that political reality, the Giants have an opportunity to send a much more powerful message.

The SF Giants deserve credit for embracing Pride in spite of a league commissioner indifferent to inclusion. However, in the face of a dangerous political movement targeting LGBTQIA+ people in the United States, queer people need allies to understand the importance of making equally fervent political statements. If Farhan Zaidi wants to oppose LGBTQIA+ hate, he needs to embrace the inherent politics of Pride rather than running from them.