Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway urged MLB not to punish San Francisco Giants players after they wrote Bible verses on their Pride Night hats.
Hanaway shared the letter on X, writing that Missouri will “not tolerate any threat to punish a player for exercising his sincerely held religious or moral beliefs.” Doing so, she wrote, is “both illegal and un-American.”
“Forcing employees to espouse viewpoints that conflict with deeply held religious beliefs violates both federal and state law,” the letter added, and went on to call MLB’s actions “just plain wrong.”
“As America’s pastime, baseball should not discriminate against the political, moral, or religious beliefs of any player,” Hanaway wrote. She noted that by “forcing players to espouse political or religious beliefs that they disagree with on pain of discipline, MLB is betraying a core tenet of American law and civic culture.”
She threatened to open an investigation into MLB unless it pledged not to discipline players who choose to refrain from wearing Pride materials or include Bible verses on hats.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a similar letter to MLB Commissioner Robert Manfred. “I write with grave concern over your reported decision to issue a formal warning to three Major League Baseball (MLB) players for publicly expressing their Christian faith. This follows a high-profile undercover investigation that revealed at least one MLB team discriminated against a player based on his Catholic faith,” Hawley wrote. “You must answer for what appears to be a pattern of discrimination within MLB against baseball players who profess their Christian faith.”
