Lance Berkman - nicknamed “Big Puma” - was a bona fide baseball star in his 15 year major league career. He hit 366 home runs, retired with a lifetime batting average of .293, and was named to six All-Star teams. He won a World Series title and Comeback Player of the Year with the St. Louis Cardinals in 2011. He was only the second major leaguer in history to hit more than 40 home runs in a season as a switch-hitter. Mickey Mantle was the first.
Forbes Magazine recognized him as one of the “30 most generous celebrities” in 2012. In 2001, He started a group called “Berkman’s Bunch,” an outreach for underprivileged kids who meet with Berkman before Saturday home games for autographs and other gifts. When West, Texas was ravaged by an explosion at a local fertilizer plant in 2013, Berkman purchased and donated a fire truck to the reeling city. Altogether, he and his wife have donated $2,500,000 to a charity they started called “The Lord’s Fund.”
However, the rabid homosexual supremacy movement doesn’t care anything about all that. When Berkman was invited to be the speaker at the Cardinals’ July 30 “Christian Day,” the Gay Gestapo went into hyperdrive to pressure the Cardinals to rescind the invitation.
Their reason? Berkman, who has four daughters, quite sensibly does not want boys showering with girls. As a longtime Houston Astro, Berkman opposed a Houston city ordinance in 2015 that mandated that male students be given unchallenged access to girls bathrooms, locker rooms, and shower rooms as long as they self-identify as a girl on any particular day.
Berkman said,
“The issue is, what to do about a 15 or 16-year-old boy who thinks he’s a girl and wants to shower with the girls. Maybe he is [transgender], maybe he’s confused. But I wouldn’t want him in the shower with my daughters. We shouldn’t have the rights of 2 percent of the population trump the rights of the other 98 percent.”
Let’s not forget that during the battle over that ordinance Houston’s lesbian mayor tried to subpoena the sermon notes of area pastors who opposed this ordinance. She eventually abandoned the idea after her office received sermon notes from pastors all over the country and was flooded with 1500 donated Bibles. The bathroom policy was repealed at the ballot box overwhelmingly, going down by a 61-39 margin. (You can view the 30-second ad that Berkman filmed for the campaign here.)
Berkman along the way has denounced the “virtue” of “tolerance,” which Aristotle said was one of the “last virtues of a dying society.” Berkman said,
“To me tolerance is the virtue that’s killing this country. We’re tolerant of everything. You know, everything is OK, and as long as you want to do it and as long as it feels good to you then it’s perfectly acceptable do it. Those are the kinds of things that lead you down a slippery slope, and you’ll get in trouble in a hurry.”
Berkman’s experience with Christian Day exposes the lie that the gay lobby is about tolerance at all in any way, shape or form. LGBT agitators are not about tolerance but domination and exclusion. Gay activists are not about homosexual equality but homosexual supremacy. For them, it is homosexuality uber alles. These Christophobic bullies and bigots are determined to leave no place for the Christian faith in the public arena, even in a baseball stadium.
Berkman’s position on this volatile social issue is rooted in his sincere Christian faith. As he said on The 700 Club in May 2007, "What you’re running after, what you’re trying to find will not provide you with any lasting fulfillment. The only place you can find that is Jesus Christ. It's in the service of God you’ll find that lasting fulfillment."
The Cardinals, to their credit, have refused to be bullied, intimidated, and cowed into meek submission. The club is standing by its decision to support both Christian Day and Lance Berkman, and brilliantly doing so on the grounds of inclusivity. How in the world, the Cardinals seem to be saying, can you consider yourself inclusive if you deliberately exclude the 71% of Americans who call themselves Christians?
Said the Cardinals,
“As an organization, the Cardinals have always been committed to bringing like-minded groups together to share in the unifying experience of Cardinals baseball. We are an inclusive organization with a social responsibility to be welcoming to all types of people and organizations.”
They’re so inclusive, as a matter of fact, that they are hosting their first ever “Pride Night” later this summer. But of course that equality was not nearly enough for the gay lobby, who seem to live in mortal dread that someone, somewhere may be exercising his constitutional right to the free exercise of the Christian faith. And daring to declare in public that he believes what the Bible teaches, that there are just two genders, and that marriage is exclusively the union of one man and one woman.
Many other major league baseball teams hold similar faith-based events. Last summer, for instance, my family and I attended “Fellowship Day” at AT&T Park in San Francisco, if you can believe it, a post-game event which was attended by thousands of Giants fans and featured five-time All Star catcher Buster Posey.
So here’s a tip of the hat to the St. Louis Cardinals and a fervent prayer that Christianity will once again resume an honored place in America’s public life, including in our athletic stadiums. It’s the least we should expect in a nation founded on the truth claims and moral standards of the Judeo-Christian tradition. As the Supreme Court ruled in 1892, “This is a Christian nation.” It’s time we started acting like it again.
