What Lives?

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love baseball. Some of the fondest memories I have of my childhood are related to the grand game. I remember winning, and loosing, smiling and crying. I remember my dad being an umpire and treating me more strictly than the rest of the players because he didn’t want anyone to think he was favoring me. I didn’t understand that concept then, but now I can see there was a lot of wisdom in it. Many of our family outings have been built around baseball. When my dad turned 75, we went to Cooperstown to visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. And when he turned 80, we traveled to Arlington and Houston to watch the Rangers and the Astros.

So, it is with that as a background, that I pen the current article. The new season, after being delayed for nearly four months, finally began last night. The Yankees met the winners of last year’s World Series, the Washington Nationals. The game was rather strange to behold: no one sitting in the stands, many players and coaches wearing masks, the game itself being called after five inning because of bad weather, and so on. But the thing (really, the two things) that caught my eye was the complete kowtowing on the part of Major League Baseball (MLB) to the “Black Lives Matter” movement. According to news articles, players are “allowed” to wear patches on their uniforms. One of them reads “United for Change” and the other reads “Black Lives Matter.” And the pitching mound sported a “BLM” logo behind the box.

Now, although it may not seem like it, I wasn’t born yesterday. I know that MLB, like any other big business, is all about the bottom line. I don’t want to be super cynical, but let’s face it, big business will do whatever it thinks is convenient or expedient in order to increase that bottom line: money. Thus, I’m not too chafed by such a brazen attempt to grovel before an organization that in their own words “…affirm[s] the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. Our network centers those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.” (emphasis mine)

Those of us who are believers have understood, much longer than “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) has even existed, that life matters. But unlike BLM, we know all lives matter because everyone is made in the image of God. Those who are fixated on the founding documents of this nation as though they were the Bible, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, will recognize the fact that life matters because all men have been “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Mr. Jefferson can be forgiven for including “happiness” among those rights, but it is undeniable that life and liberty are among those rights that the Creator has indeed bestowed on each and every human being, whatever their color.

But unlike the believer who can point to the Bible and say “lives matter because God says they matter,” the majority of those who follow the BLM narrative cannot base their belief on anything objective and true. In their worldview, black lives or any lives matter simply because they say they do. And if that is the basis under which anything has value, then those things may be valuable today, but not valuable tomorrow. You can see that very flaw even today. In 2019, there were nearly 300,000 abortions of black babies in this country. So, you see, black lives matter, unless they happen to be in the womb. Then they are strangely valueless. If you go to the BLM website, the one thing you won’t see about their mission is that of defending the most defenseless among us: the unborn. If you’re a thinking individual, you have to ask yourself the question “can I support an organization that so glaringly omits those who are the most defenseless from their supposed mission?” BLM has a lot of other issues that make it dangerous and errant, as the quote above demonstrates. But hypocrisy is perhaps the biggest of all.