UVA Law alum Harmeet Dhillon, who helped the Youngkin MAGA appointees on the UVA Board of Visitors get rid of Jim Ryan over DEI, has her sights set on making sure homophobes in MLB have the right to post messages that they think reclaim the rainbow from the LGBTQ+ community on their little ballcaps.
Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Trump DOJ – which is just a joke, that she is anywhere near anything involving civil rights – was on Newsmax yesterday to talk about a warning letter that MLB sent to its players after a veritable who’s that? of San Francisco Giants pitchers made homophobic bigots of themselves in the team’s 5-1 loss to the Chicago Cubs last week on Pride Night at Oracle Park, which, and this is important, we’re talking about this particular Pride Night being in San Francisco here.
The warning, boiled down: don’t do that again.
Landen Roupp, a native of Rocky Mount, N.C., where he played at Faith Christian School, before a four-year stint at UNC-Wilmington, got the start on the mound for the Giants in the Pride Night game, and before he took the mound, he had defaced the front of his Pride Night Giants cap with the message: “Gen 9:11-16.”
This is the now common effort of the homophobes among us to reclaim the rainbow from “the gays,” by citing a biblical verse handed down to us from goat herders that we’ve since translated into English to the effect that the presence of a rainbow in the sky is symbolic that the god guy will never again try to flood us all into oblivion.
JT Brubaker, and his career 9-28, 4.71 ERA, 1.36 WHIP, narrowed the verse from Genesis to “9:13-15” on the front of his cap.
The other guys who were used to finish out the Giants loss – Sam Hentges, who pitched in 2018 at High-A Lynchburg, didn’t wear a Pride cap, instead doffing the standard-issue Giants hat for his appearance; and Ryan Walker, who pitched in Richmond in 2021 and 2022, half-assed his Genesis reference, trying to hide it on the side of his Pride cap.
Dhillon, as a guest on the Newsmax talk show of the overfed former Baptist Press journo Todd Starnes, said, in reference to the MLB warning later, that “it is illegal to treat employees differently in their terms and conditions of employment, promotion opportunities, hiring, et cetera, on the basis of protected characteristics, and religion is one of those protected characteristics under our federal laws.”
“That doesn’t automatically mean that Major League Baseball employers are in the wrong here, but what it means is that they’re treating people of faith and face faith in their faith-based messages on their hats differently than, say, employees who want to have pins that are LGBTQ or other types of messaging on their hats, and they tolerate that, in other words, if they’re applying that uniform policy in a discriminatory manner, that definitely could be the basis of an employment discrimination claim by a private lawyer or by the EEOC,” Dhillon said.
She was supposedly the editor of Virginia Law Review during her time at UVA.
That sentence was about 1,000 words, give or take.
William Faulkner is saying, from the grave, pause, catch your breath, use a period every now and then.
“Where I’m telling people to look, is, like, you should definitely have a lawyer take a look at this, and or call my friend Andrea Jacobs, who’s the chair over there at the EEOC, and they take care of these types of matters,” Dhillon said.
Somebody is high on their own supply here.
Dhillon is threatening to throw the weight of the federal government to protect the right of small-minded people to hide behind “religion” as the basis of their bigoted discrimination against others.
That’s where we are as a country now.
She didn’t learn this at UVA, I hope.
I mean, didn’t Thomas Jefferson coin the phrase, “separation of church and state”?