04a Faith

Major League Baseball has drawn a line in the sand: rainbow logos are fine, Bible verses are not. Three San Francisco Giants pitchers have reportedly been warned by the MLB after appearing during Friday night’s Pride Night game with Scripture references written on their caps, prompting a fresh round of questions about whether baseball’s diversity mantra extends to Christians who dissent from the league’s liberal social messaging.

Giants starter Landen Roupp appeared with “Genesis 9:12-16” written on his cap, the biblical passage describing God’s covenant symbolized by the rainbow. The inscription partially overlapped the Pride-themed rainbow “SF” logo featured on the special-edition cap. Relievers JT Brubaker and Ryan Walker also displayed Bible verses, while pitcher Sam Hentges opted to wear the club’s standard black cap rather than the Pride Night version.

MLB was not amused. “The writing on the cap violates our rules, and consistent with normal practice, we have warned the players about future violations,” MLB Chief Communications Officer Pat Courtney told The Athletic. Roupp, however, made clear he wasn’t backing away from the message.

“It’s just about God’s covenant and a promise that he makes to us,” Roupp told reporters. “That’s just kind of something I believe in, and I stand firm in that, and I’m thankful we live in a country where we have the freedom to believe what we want … and express what we want.”

Approval of same-sex marriage, moral acceptance of gay and lesbian relations, and endorsement of gender changes are all down from peaks reached in the early 2020s.

While most Americans still favor legal same-sex marriages, the 65% who do so today is down six percentage points from the peak in 2022 and 2023. Similarly, the percentage viewing gay or lesbian relations as morally acceptable, 62%, has not been lower since 2016. And the share of Americans who consider changing one’s gender morally acceptable has declined eight points over the past five years, to 38%.

On three key LGBTQ issues — same-sex marriage, the morality of homosexuality, and gender identity — Gallup’s polling data told the same exact story: Popularity for all three skyrocketed between the 2010s and the early 2020s. The future, it seemed, was pro-trans and pro-LGBTQ.

But over the past few years, the pendulum swung HARD in the opposite direction:

Between 1996 and 2022, the percentage of U.S. adults in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage increased by 44 points, from 27% to 71%. In 2024, the figure dipped to 69%, and it has shown a marginal decline each year since.

Gallup first asked about the morality of same-sex relations in 2001, when 40% said they were morally acceptable. By 2022, 71% held that view, before a sharp drop to 64% in 2023, holding at about that level during the past three years.

When Gallup first asked about changing one’s gender in 2021, 46% found it morally acceptable, and 51% found it morally wrong. Today, those numbers stand at 38% and 57%, respectively.