The Anti-Bigots Suggest Ivan Provorov Go Die in Ukraine

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, January 20, 2023

‘I respect everybody’s choices,” Ivan Provorov explained to reporters who asked him why he did not appear in a rainbow jersey for the Philadelphia Flyers’ Pride Night. “My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion. That’s all I’m going to say. If you have any hockey questions, I’ll answer those.” One reporter asked a brief follow-up: What religion? To which Provorov quietly replied, “Russian Orthodox.” After that, he insisted he would say no more.

And, predictably, prominent commentators pretended to be entirely shocked, surprised, and appalled that there are still people in their midst who have moral convictions consistent with the ancient and irreformable teachings of their religious traditions.

It’s a curious test of strength that has to be performed every few months. It’s practically a ritual. Progressives in some institution demand some kind of positive affirmation for homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism — and whatever else is grouped under the appended plus sign. Then they see if there is any religious person willing to resist them. Then the occasion becomes a test to see if the religious person says anything really racy, has some kind of lifestyle hypocrisy that would be fun to expose, or has a weakness of will. Progressives test how much institutional, legal, and mob pressure can be brought to bear, and how much backlash it all generates. Under the guise of seeking to see if prejudice has been eliminated, the true desire expressed in this ritual is to see if this clash can be brought to a really dramatic blowup that settles terms once and for all.

What we have discovered so far in this instance of the test is that hockey players can’t quite yet be forced to wear clothes advocating a belief in the equality of all sexual orientations that they do not profess. But they can be pilloried in the most comically bigoted ways for refusing to do so.

Former player and now commentator on the NHL network E. J. Hradek took to television to imply that perhaps Provorov should die in Ukraine if he feels so strongly about it.

“Ivan Provorov can get on a plane any day he wants and go back to a place where he feels more comfortable, take less money, and get on with his life that way if it’s that problematic for him,” Hradek said.

“If this is that much of a problem for him to maybe assimilate into his group of teammates and in the community and here in this country, that’s okay,” he said. “Go back where you feel more comfortable. I understand there’s a conflict going on over there; maybe get involved.”

The premise of Hradek’s position is that anyone who still holds to roughly Barack Obama’s 2008 views on marriage 15 years later has failed to assimilate and should be treated as a dirty foreigner who should probably die in the Donbas. This is quite a flip from the days when sports journalists felt it was their duty to correct fans who expressed any displeasure with Carlos Delgado, who stayed in the dugout during renditions of “God Bless America.”

“What’s more American than free speech and protest?” they would shout back at the first-time, long-timers calling into the radio show. Now being American means conformity; it means you can’t object to your corporate employer’s imposing a political message on your body.

I suppose we should praise Hradek for restraining himself from saying that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman should ask to borrow a HIMARS system from the Pentagon to fire upon Provorov ahead of the next matchup against the Devils.

Sid Seixeiro, a Toronto morning show host, decided to go nuclear.

Got that? Provorov’s employer should be fined $1 million by the league. And Seixeiro claims that “when you look at people’s lives who normally say that publicly [that their religious beliefs forbid them from endorsing certain messages], you would throw up with what you saw! You would throw up with what you saw.”

So Seixeiro’s idea is that anyone who offers a religious objection to delivering a compulsory message is secretly a disgusting moral reprobate. It’s something he’s “seen a million times!” And he’s saying this while genuinely believing himself to be standing up against bigotry.

There are going to be many more such tests in the future. Why? Because the desire for affirmation in this case is bottomless. It springs from an insecurity that cannot be assuaged and that will only grow more paranoid as the conformism triumphs over more social institutions. And because the resistance to this affirmation is rooted in the parts of religious faith that can’t be uprooted by passing fads, and only grow more sturdy under political suppression. Days later Provorov’s jersey has sold out everywhere.