title:  San Diego Padres Deliberately Humiliate Local Gay Men’s Chorus (VIDEO)
text: California is known as one of the most gay-friendly areas of the country, but they are not without their share of homophobes. This was made abundantly clear on Saturday during a home game being played by the San Diego Padres baseball team. The San Diego Gay Men s Chorus was due to perform the national anthem prior to the game s start, and things went horribly wrong.Perhaps there was already foreshadowing that the Gay Men s Chorus would not be welcome to do their performance, considering the fact that there were calls for them to pay for tickets for the so-called privilege of performing   even if they had no intentions of staying to watch the game. However, if you think that was bad, what happened during the performance itself was infinitely worse. As the chorus took the field to sing the Star Spangled Banner, to their horror, a recording of a woman s voice singing the song was played. Game officials made no move to stop the recording, and made no apology. The Gay Men s Chorus just had to stand on the field until the recording finished, and then they were taken off the field. When they were being led away, there were many homophobic taunts shouted, including one that chanted,  You sing like a girl.The San Diego Gay Men s Chorus released the following statement regarding this disgusting situation:What should have been a night of joy and celebration at Petco Park last night, instead turned into a nightmare raising serious questions about homophobia within the San Diego Padres organization and its relationship with the LGBT community.Before the start of the last night s San Diego Padres game, 100 volunteer singers of the San Diego Gay Men s Chorus took to the field to proudly sing the National Anthem. Instead, in front of the large crowd gathered for the LA Dodgers game, the San Diego Padres played the recorded voice of a woman singing the anthem.No attempt was made to stop the recording and start over. No announcement of apology was made to the singers or their friends and families in the stands. No attempt to correct the situation occurred other than to force the 100 men to stand in the spotlight of center field for the song s duration and then be escorted off the field to the heckles of baseball fans shouting homophobic taunts including  You sing like a girl. This incident followed several days of troubling comments and behavior within the San Diego Padres organization. Three days before the game, San Diego Padres representatives aggressively sought to prevent singers from performing the National Anthem unless they purchased a ticket to the game even if they did not plan to stay for the game which was not part of any previous discussion or written or verbal agreement and would have cost the small, community-based non-profit thousands of dollars. The demand eventually was rescinded on Friday following repeated complaints made by SDGMC and San Diego Pride to San Diego Padres management.With this as background, we call on the San Diego Padres and Major League Baseball to immediately launch a full and transparent investigation into the incident to determine if someone or some people intentionally engaged in anti-gay discrimination or a hate crime by playing a female s voice to represent a group of gay men with the purpose of denigrating and/or ridiculing gay men. The historic significance of such an act is not lost on the LGBT community especially in relation to professional sports and added to the depth of embarrassment experienced by the singers and their families.We also call upon the City of San Diego City Attorney s Office and the City of San Diego Human Relations Commission to independently investigate this incident to determine if members of the San Diego Padres organization engaged in activity in violation of the San Diego Human Rights Ordinance or engaged in any deliberate hate crimes based on sexual orientation.We applaud San Diego Padres President and Chief Executive Office Mike Dee for reaching out to our organization to apologize and to offer to meet with LGBT leaders to discuss the incident. We look forward to this meeting. We believe it is important to work together with the San Diego Padres organization to build bridges within the LGBT community rather than burn them down as happened last night.However, we are very disappointed with the San Diego Padres dismissively brief two sentence statement at 9:37 p.m. on Saturday, May 21, 2016 which did not appropriately address the gravity of the situation nor pay due to the 100 volunteers who took to the field in celebration and were led off in humiliation.Hopefully, Mike Dee gets rid of the people associated with and responsible for what happened at that baseball game. There is simply no excuse for what was done to these singers. This is blatant homophobia, and it was done in an effort to humiliate an organization of gay singers, to let them know in no uncertain terms that even in supposedly liberal California that they would not be accepted.Since fans were deprived of the opportunity to hear it on Saturday, here is a video of the San Diego Gay Men s Chorus singing the national anthem:Featured image via video screen capture