When the state steals baseball

 (My new American Thinker post)

Years ago in Cuba, my father, brother, and I spent a lot of Sunday afternoons watching baseball games.  I have memories of the old professional Cuban winter league and players like Minnie Minoso, Camilo Pascual, Pedro Ramos and others.  However, most of my memories were actually watching the new teams that the regime created after outlawing pro teams.  It was decent baseball but all politics.  In the old professional league, the outfield fences had advertising from local merchants.  The new league used those spaces to promote slogans praising the revolution and attacking capitalism.  As my father used to say, everything with these people is pushing their agenda.  It was.

So am I surprised that the Left is now targeting baseball?  I am not because we’ve seen this movie before.  I am glad that Mike Gonzalez addressed this issue vis-a-vis the Dodgers.  This is what he wrote:   

This time, they’re coming after baseball. Baseball. Get it? The National Pastime. The inner sanctum of homespun goodness. Your last refuge from the crazy. The leftists intent on politicizing everything, changing society, and coercing changed behavior won’t leave you alone, ever, anywhere.

If you thought you could ignore this attack on your way of life, you were fooling yourself. If you thought the “culture wars” were for others, think again. The choice here is binary: You surrender or you fight this evil with all your might.    

The place this time is Los Angeles. Yes, the Dodgers, one of the most hallowed franchises in the most hallowed sport. And the medium is one of the things that you hold most dear — your religion, your faith, your God.

Wow, Mike’s words remind me of something I used to hear when my father and friends would chat over a cigar and one of those wonderful cups of coffee.  Mike is right about people who think that they can sleep during the revolution.  On the contrary, they will wake you up, drag out of the house and force the ideology on you.  If you resist, then you will pay the price.  First, they call you a CIA agent and then they throw you in a jail.

Yes, these cultural wars are part of an attack on traditional values.  The objective, as we learned in Cuba, is to destroy the family unit and rewrite history.  And no one can escape it, especially if you love watching sports.  The left loves using sports to promote their ideology.  Again, I saw it in Cuba and sadly I’m seeing it again now. 

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