A few San Francisco Giants pitchers wrote a Bible verse on their Pride Night caps this month. The MLB warned them that the modification violated uniform rules, insisting it had nothing to do with the message itself. Vice President J.D. Vance − who I happened to live near years before either of us had any reason to think about Major League Baseball’s uniform policy − posted on social media: “Trump won, we don’t have to do this anymore.”
That’s a remarkable thing to say. Not because it’s shocking (versions of it get said constantly, by people across the political spectrum) but because it states plainly what usually stays unspoken: that the principle was never really the point. It was really about the power to stop pretending it was.
I recognized the sentence immediately, because I’ve spent most of my adult life inside a fight about exactly this question, and I’ve watched nearly everyone involved make the same move at some point, regardless of their politics.
The difference between rights and principles
A few years ago, Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem. It wasn’t disruptive, it wasn’t violent. It was a symbolic expression of the kind that has shaped American civic life since the country’s founding. Many of the same people now defending the Giants pitchers’ right to write Scripture on their own caps were, not long ago, demanding Kaepernick be benched, fined, or run out of the league for kneeling. The reverse holds too. Plenty of people who defended Kaepernick passionately have gone noticeably quiet now that the protected expression cuts against their own politics instead of toward it.
What it reveals is more uncomfortable than the partisanship before us: Our arguments about free expression tend to expose our biases far more reliably than our principles.
Legally, none of this touches the First Amendment at all. The MLB isn’t the government. The Constitution restrains state action; it has nothing to say about what a private league requires of its own employees’ uniforms. MLB can set whatever rules it wants here, and no court is going to find a constitutional violation in a cap dispute.
But I think we’ve let that legal technicality become a moral exit ramp. “It’s legal” has become the end of the conversation instead of the beginning of a harder one: What kind of civic culture do we actually want to practice, separate from what the law strictly permits us to get away with?
A healthy civic society holds itself to more than the bare legal minimum. The First Amendment is better understood as the floor of how we treat each other, not the ceiling. It’s a framework for living alongside people who believe things you don’t, not a finish line you cross the moment a court declines to get involved.
The real test of conviction
The real question isn’t whether the MLB has the legal right to discipline a player over a cap. It’s whether we, the people watching, posting, and voting, reward conformity and punish dissent the instant either becomes inconvenient to our own side.
None of this means every form of expression deserves applause, or that criticism is off the table. The opposite, actually. The healthiest response to speech you find misguided or offensive has always been more speech (argument, persuasion, organizing), not a league memo or a senator’s letter threatening investigation. Censorship rarely changes anyone’s mind. It tends to harden the position it was meant to silence.
Sports have been a stage for civic life for about as long as organized sports have existed. We ask athletes to embody resilience, sacrifice, unity, and conviction, and then act surprised when the same athletes use that platform to talk about justice, faith, or conscience instead. This is the predictable result of putting people with strong beliefs in front of a national audience and asking them to mean something.
The real test was never whether we agreed with what a particular athlete said, but rather, whether we extend the same grace and freedom to people we disagree with that we demand for ourselves when we’re the ones speaking. Free expression is easy to defend when the speaker already confirms what you believe. It becomes meaningful when it protects the person trying to convince you of something else.
“Trump won, we don’t have to do this anymore” is an honest sentence, in its way. It just happens to describe the opposite of a principle. A principle is the thing you keep defending precisely when winning would let you stop.
Simon Tam is the founder of The Slants and the central figure in Matal v. Tam (2017), the unanimous Supreme Court decision that struck down the government’s power to deny trademarks on disparagement grounds. He speaks on First Amendment issues nationally.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: MLB’s pride controversy exposes free speech double standard | Opinion
Reporting by Simon Tam, Opinion contributor / Cincinnati Enquirer
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By Simon Tam, Opinion contributor | USA TODAY Network
