Maybe Hinkle has some really interesting and well-developed position on the question of homosexuality; maybe she has only the banal and sentimental because-the-Bible-tells-me-so ideas that one might expect from a guest on The 700 Club. It really shouldn’t matter to the question of playing soccer, which is about another kind of scoring altogether.

But of course it must be made to matter. You will wear the jersey celebrating gay pride, or you will not play. Hinkle chose not to play. Fair enough. To her credit, she has not engaged in Colin Kaepernick-level grandstanding or done the usual thing and filed a lawsuit. She only declined to participate, to give her affirmation.

Yet that’s an unforgivable crime for our so-called liberals. That’s what’s really behind the demand for public funding of abortion, contraception, and the like: The strategy is to ensure that everybody is implicated, corporately. The pretense that Sandra Fluke can’t afford a rubber is ridiculous. Nobody really believes that. It’s like Antiochus and the Jews, whose insistence upon their own faith and their own ways offended those who desired to “oblige them to partake of the sacrifices” and “adopt the customs” of their political rulers. It is not enough that gay people should be allowed to organize their own lives as they wish and to follow their interests and their pleasures where they will. You can decline to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but when they raise the rainbow banner, you’d damned well better stand up straight and salute.