During the opening day game between the Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium, Sam Coonrod, the San Francisco Giants pitcher refused to kneel to honor the Black Lives Matter movement when the rest of the MLB players knelt.
"I'm a Christian, so I just believe that I can't kneel before anything besides God."
Coonrod shared his views on the BLM movement, "I just can't get on board with a couple things I've read about Black Lives Matter, how they lean toward Marxism. And they said some negative things about the nuclear family. I just can't get on board with that."
Coonrod made a disclaimer that his gesture was not from bad intentions. "I don't think I'm better than anybody. I'm just a Christian. I feel if I did kneel I'd be a hypocrite. I don't want to be a hypocrite," Coonrod said.
"I'm not mad at someone who decided to kneel. I just don't think it's too much to ask that I just get the same respect," Coonrod expressed.
Giants team manager Gabe Kapler respected Coonrod's gesture.
"We were going to give them the choice on whether they were going to stand, kneel or do something else. That was a personal decision for Sam," Kapler said.
However, Coonrod was criticized by Dan Gartland, a Sports Illustrated writer for thinking joining a cause that treats others with love and respect is considered hypocritical.
This criticism was in turn criticized by Rod Dreher, a senior editor at The American Conservative.
Dreher asked if Garland would have said the same thing "if Coonrod were a Muslim, and he politely declined to eat something with pork in it that was offered to him."
Dreher went on to quote Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio Journal, "It helps no one to present claims about the meaning of racial identity without recognizing how a radically secularized understanding of personhood and social order guarantees unresolvable antagonisms."
