...and fail miserably. Not sure if anyone diaried this, just throwing it out there cause it's messed up and coincidentally I attended the game.
Objecting to the confluence of two promotions at last night's Padres game – "Pride Night," a group event for local gays and lesbians, and a team giveaway of floppy hats to children 14 and younger – several Christian and conservative groups called for a public protest and boycott of the game.
Roughly 75 protesters showed up outside Petco Park's front gate dressed in red T-shirts emblazoned with the message "Save Our Kids." They handed out fliers. A few attempted to talk with Padre fans as they arrived for the 5:05 p.m. game that was nationally televised on ESPN.
"We're here to inform parents, to warn them about what's happening inside (the ballpark)," said James Hartline, a self-described Christian activist who directed the protest. "Bringing together homosexuals with baseball and kids is beyond bounds. We're trying to get people to turn around, not go to the game, and we're succeeding."
So I guess the "boycott" didn't really work... there were 41,000+ people there, which is pretty much a full house.
I saw the folks in red shirts but didn't know who they were. But now that I just read the article, I remember overhearing the people sitting next to me talking about the "Jesus freaks" they saw, so that must have been them. But by the same token, I didn't even know there was a pride event going on either, probably because I was mostly just stoked about getting to see Greg Maddux pitch for the first time.
"Maybe it's just coincidence. Maybe it's just bad planning," Loveland said. "But our bottom line is that Christian folk believe in the sanctity of marriage as stated in the Bible, one man and one woman. Homosexuality is a sin,and promoting it with a Pride Night when thousands of kids are also going to be (at the ballpark) is wrong. So we took a moral stand. We're not anti-gay. We're anti-anti-Christian."
k... ??
The "Thomas More Law Center" had a harsher take.
Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center commented, "In my opinion, this confluence of events is not a mistake. The Padres are playing the part of the Pied Pieper leading unsuspecting children into accepting the homosexual lifestyle as normal. Children should not be subjected to the ‘in-your-face’ antics of these radical groups. The Thomas More Law Center wants unsuspecting parents that hope to get their children a free hat and maybe allow their children to run the bases at PETCO to know that they are also walking into a modern day scene of Sodom and Gomorrah."
Yikes! Uhhhh, Richard? Who are YOU calling RADICAL?
Local gay leaders responded with puzzlement, dismay and some anger.
"We're talking about a baseball game. That's all this is," said Ron deHarte, executive director of San Diego Pride, which had purchased 1,000 tickets to yesterday's game, then advertised them on the group's Web site as "Out at the Park with the San Diego Padres, an official San Diego Pride event."
I can also report that the crowd sang along to "God Bless America" during the 7th inning stretch with the same intensity I've heard at every other Petco Park game I've ever been to. The most drama I saw the whole night was in the 9th inning, when we alllllllllmost came back from a 5-1 deficit, but couldn't quite pull it off. Oh yeah, and also when all the kids in attendance suddenly grew devil horns, ruining their new floppy hats.