Irrational Rainbow Spasms

Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov poked the LGBT hornet's nest recently by refusing to paint his door frame with lamb's blood wear the Pride flag on his jersey.

“I respect everybody and I respect everybody’s choices. My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion.”

Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov on refusing to wear a rainbow jersey for warm ups during “Pride Night” due to his Russian Orthodox faith.
pic.twitter.com/wCUl8slmRB

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 18, 2023

Veins bulged, eyes popped and spittle flew as nearly everyone screamed out in rage at his affront to men who like to have sex with other men.

Provorov's explanation was simple. As an adherent of the Russian Orthodox Church, he believes that homosexuality is disordered. He was gentle about it and didn't talk about gays going to hell, he just refused to wear the flag.

The reaction wasn't rational, it was a spasm of incoherent fury. It didn't deal with anything substantial, it was simply a demand that everyone, everywhere must celebrate and affirm the importance and righteousness of anal sex between two men. Gently refusing to do so resulted in calls for Provorov to be shipped back to Russia, fired, fined and more.

I apologize for being crude there, but I think it's important to call it what it is. I want to be dispassionate and clinical in my language here.

I don't know much about the Orthodox faith, save that it is closer to my own Roman Catholicism than any other faith save Anglican Catholicism.

I'll go out on a very short and sturdy limb here and say that Orthodoxy, like Catholicism, is a sophisticated, internally consistent description of reality. It encompasses science, philosophy, theology and more. It provides explanations for how the Universe came into being, how life began, why reality is ordered and discoverable, why Man is the only animal capable of rational thought and art, the meaning and purpose of life and, finally, a set of first principles from which an entire objective morality can be derived.

The people screaming in rage at Provorov didn't offer rebuttals of any substantive element of Orthodoxy, they just accused him of hate. A rational response to his refusal to celebrate anal sex would have been to provide an intellectual construct that did a better job of explaining reality than the Russian Orthodox Church does. None has been forthcoming.

The very people howling that Provorov is full of hate are themselves exhibiting nothing but furious, irrational hate.

The real question that Provorov's refusal to kneel in devout homage to anal sex between two men is this: Is Orthodoxy right?

Here, a Russian Orthodox priest chooses not to read the book "Gender Queer" and instead is studying a faith that is so deep and so complex that a lifetime of learning would leave much of its genius untouched. As you can clearly see, he is filled with hate.