Our double standards on athletes and politics are on display

Opinion>Opinions - Civil Rights The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill Our double standards on athletes and politics are on display Comments: by Jonathan Zimmerman, opinion contributor - 06/26/26 1:00 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Jonathan Zimmerman, opinion contributor - 06/26/26 1:00 PM ET Comments: Link copied

Protesters hold up signs in reaction to San Francisco Giants’ players recently writing on Pride-themed hats outside of Oracle Park before a baseball game between the Giants and the Athletics Tuesday, June 23, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

When I was in college, my best professor was obsessed with the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who taught that human beings bind themselves into moral communities, marked by shared values and rituals. He also thought modern society had forever altered those bonds, paving the way for the “free development of individual variations.”

What, then, would hold society together? Durkheim’s answer was individualism itself. Paradoxically, collective solidarity depended on everyone believing in personal liberty.

And we don’t.

That’s the only way to understand the recent dust-up over three San Francisco Giants players who wore a Biblical verse on their caps during Pride Night. Critics on the left condemned them as homophobes.

Meanwhile, conservatives claimed the players were victims of religious discrimination. After Major League Baseball warned the players that they had breached league rules against political expressions on uniforms, the Trump administration announced that it would investigate the league for violating the Civil Rights Act. Other players had been allowed to wear patches proclaiming “Black Lives Matter,” assistant U.S. attorney general Harmeet Dhillon wrote, so the ban on the Biblical verses reflected a “double standard.”

But conservatives have their own double standard around these matters. And if you think otherwise, I have two words for you: Colin Kaepernick.

Remember Kaepernick? The San Francisco 49ers quarterback was blackballed by the National Football League for kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality. And the campaign against him was spearheaded by America’s right-wing standard-bearer, President Trump.

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired,'” Trump told a rally in 2017, during his first year in the White House.

The following year, Trump suggested that players taking a knee should be deported. “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or . . . maybe you shouldn’t be in the country,” he mused.

My fellow liberals rallied to Kaepernick’s defense, insisting that he should be allowed to express his opinions. “There are gonna be a lot of folks who do stuff we don’t agree with … but as long as they’re doing it within the law . . . it’s also their right,” declared Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.

Rejecting the idea that Kaepernick disrespected America, meanwhile, liberals claimed that his protest was itself an act of patriotism. “I can think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights, anytime, anywhere, in any place,” Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke argued, during his unsuccessful bid for the Senate in 2018.

O’Rourke’s comment went viral, earning him accolades from LeBron James and an invitation to appear on Ellen DeGeneres’ TV show. But I haven’t heard many liberals stand up for the rights of San Francisco baseball players to dissent, in the same metropolis where Colin Kaepernick played football.

Instead, liberals urged the Giants to do what the NFL did to Kaepernick: fire the offending players. That is what happened earlier this year to Chicago Bulls basketball guard Jaden Ivey, who was waived after he posted a video condemning Pride Month for its “unrighteousness.”

And that reminds us that liberals have a double standard, too. I don’t agree with the players’ views of the Bible, which proclaims the equality and humanity of everyone, no matter their sexuality, or of Pride celebrations. But I am proud to be part of a nation where they can speak their minds.

“It’s just something I believe in, and I stand firm in that,” pitcher Landon Roupp said, explaining why he affixed the Biblical verse to his cap. “Thankfully, we live in a country where we have freedom to believe what we want.”

That’s how it should be. And it returns us to Emile Durkheim, who saw individual freedom as a kind of shared religion in its own right. But it would not succeed, Durkheim warned, unless we also agreed on a set of moral codes and guardrails to protect it.

When your deepest beliefs are violated — whether by a kneeling football player, or a protesting baseball player — your first instincts are disgust and anger. You want to destroy whatever is distressing you.

But you need to resist that, in the service of something bigger than yourself. It’s called America. And we all worship it — at least implicitly — when we agree to let everyone have their say, anytime, anywhere, in any place. There’s nothing more American than that.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest. He is the author of “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Democracy,” which will be published next year by the American Philosophical Society Press.