After widespread criticism, Dodgers reinvite Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to Pride Night

After significant pushback from the LGBTQ community they were purporting to honor, the Los Angeles Dodgers have reinvited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to the team's Pride Night celebration June 16.

In a statement released Monday, the Dodgers offered an apology to the Sisters, saying that "in the weeks ahead, we will continue to work with our LGBTQ+ partners to better educate ourselves, find ways to strengthen the ties that bind and use our platform to support all of our fans who make up the diversity of the Dodgers family."

Those ties were threatened when the Dodgers, kowtowing to conservative influences outside their community, such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and The Catholic League president and CEO Bill Donohue, removed the Sisters from their Pride festivities and rescinded a Community Hero award on May 17.

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"Given the strong feelings of people who have been offended by the sisters’ inclusion in our evening, and in an effort not to distract from the great benefits that we have seen over the years of Pride Night, we are deciding to remove them from this year’s group of honorees," the club said in a statement last week.

Donohue, identified by GLAAD's Accountability Project as an individual using his platform "to spread misinformation and false rhetoric against LGBTQ people, youth, and allies," said his most recent letter to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred demanding the Sisters' removal was instrumental.

But a greater backlash followed, with the San Francisco-based Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence vigorously refuting Donohue's claims of "Catholic bashing" and touting their decades of service dating to 1979, when the group formed as a non-profit in response to the AIDS crisis, raising money for care and safe-sex awareness.

"Our ministry is real," Sister Rosie Partridge wrote on May 18. "We promulgate universal joy, expiate stigmatic guilt and our use of religious trappings is a response to those faiths whose members would condemn us and seek to strip away the rights of marginalized communities."

A gaggle of LGBTQ groups soon announced they would not participate in the Dodgers' Pride Night, the 10th in their history. The club said it then reengaged with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and again extended an invitation.

"We are pleased to share that they have agreed to receive the gratitude of our collective communities for the lifesaving work that they have done tirelessly for decades," the Dodgers said in a statement released Monday.

"In the weeks ahead, we will continue to work with our LGBTQ+ partners to better educate ourselves, find ways to strengthen the ties that bind and use our platform to support all of our fans who make up the diversity of the Dodgers family."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Dodgers reinvite Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to Pride Night