As frustrated as Americans might be with Donald Trump over everything from Iran to high gas and grocery prices, there are plenty of reasons to be grateful that we’re not living under a Kamala Harris administration — and the Pride controversy in Major League Baseball is highlighting a big one.

As unpredictable as the president’s second term has been, there are some areas where the White House continues to shine. After four years of targeting, marginalizing, and persecuting Christians with the full weight of the federal government, the Biden Justice Department has been replaced by a team of men and women intent on restoring Americans’ rights of free speech and religion. Nowhere is that more obvious than the league firestorm over a group of Giants’ players, who decided to either dump the team’s Pride hats or commandeer them to spread a biblical message.

When pitcher Landen Roupp, J.T. Brubaker, and shortstop Nick Ahmed scrawled “Gen. 9:12-16” next to the rainbow colors to draw attention to God’s covenant with His people, the league rebuked the move, arguing that the handwritten additions to the caps violated the league’s rules. “We have warned the players about future violations,” Pat Courtney told the media.

Fans erupted at the double standard, pointing out that there’d been multiple instances where players had written everything from tributes to Charlie Kirk to a political message on Cuba. Why is it, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wanted to know, that Christians were being singled out for criticism? The league “owes the public a corresponding measure of accountability,” he wrote to MLB Commissioner Robert Manfred, “and it invites the closest scrutiny when it appears to wield its market power to punish Americans for their beliefs.” The freedom to live out one’s faith, Hawley stressed, “does not end at the ballpark gate.”

The Trump administration agreed. Less than 48 hours later, the DOJ was involved, announcing that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would be investigating Major League Baseball for religious discrimination. “The Civil Rights Act prohibits MLB and its franchises from unreasonably burdening the rights of players with religious objections to serving as the League’s vehicle for pro-Pride messages,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon underscored in a letter to Manfred. She, like so many others, pointed to the obvious hypocrisy, noting that the MLB “has allowed players to wear uniform patches reading ‘Black Lives Matter.’ This double standard — under which players may not inscribe Bible verses on hats for one game only but may wear ‘Black Lives Matter’ patches for one game only — calls MLB’s true motives into question and raises serious concerns about MLB’s compliance with Title VII,” she insisted.

Be advised, Dhillon concluded, “The Trump Administration is committed to combatting religious discrimination. The Department of Justice will use all available means to hold employers accountable for violating the religious rights of their employees.”

Is this the response a Harris administration would have offered? Almost certainly not. After four years of training, Kamala’s team would have likely expanded on the toxic, anti-Christian culture she helped accelerate as VP. If anything, Harris’s DOJ would have cheered the crackdown on biblical messages — if not partnered with the league in their effort.

Thank goodness she never got the chance. Instead, the pressure exerted by the DOJ and Hawley yielded its first real response from Manfred, who insisted on Monday that telling the Giants’ pitchers that they cannot include Bible verses on their caps “was not discriminating or chastising those players based on their religious beliefs; rather the MLB was enforcing (with only an oral warning) a long-standing collectively-bargained rule that keeps uniforms clean and avoids controversy.” He carefully avoided the uneven enforcement of the guidance over the years, however.

The commissioner blamed “inadequate” and unclear communication on the part of the Giants for the uproar, claiming, “Some players apparently did not understand that they had the option to wear their normal uniform and elected to add messages to their hats bearing the pride logo as a result.” Even so, Manfred emphasized, “The players were neither fined nor disciplined, nor will they ever be.”

The league understands, he said, “that some players or other on-field personnel have not been comfortable wearing the pride emblem on their uniform based on their religious beliefs.” And, the commissioner added, “[W]e agree that players or other club employees — at their place of work — should not be compelled to participate in a celebratory event (particularly by wearing something on their person) if such participation would violate their religious beliefs or values.”

In closing, Manfred vowed to continue “to consult with our players” to ensure that league policies “are developed and executed in a manner that respects the diversity of values and beliefs of the people who play baseball professionally and the tens of millions of fans who love the game.”

It wasn’t an apology, but it was a step in the right direction — one that a proactive DOJ made possible. But then, this was one of the many calculations voters made when they reelected Trump. When pro-lifers are arrested in home raids at gunpoint, involved parents are labeled “domestic terrorists,” and men and women of faith are involuntarily discharged from the military for religious objections to the COVID vaccine (among hundreds of other examples), there was a genuine concern that another four years of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris would have permanently crippled the First Amendment. One of the things Americans knew from the first term of this president is that he would go to the mat for free expression — whether it was a major league pitcher, a stay-at-home mom, or a federal employee.

In fact, the rollback of these toxic, anti-faith policies has been so complete that Vice President J.D. Vance was shocked that Major League Baseball felt free to pressure these pitchers into LGBT conformity. “Trump won,” he posted. “We don’t have to do this anymore.” 

And for the last couple of years, Americans have understood that. Because one of the defining strengths of the Trump administration, FRC’s Dr. David Closson told The Washington Stand, “has been its willingness to defend religious liberty against increasingly aggressive forms of ideological conformity.” And frankly, he pointed out, “The controversy surrounding Major League Baseball’s Pride-themed team caps is not fundamentally about baseball caps; it’s about whether Americans who hold historic Christian beliefs regarding sexuality and marriage can participate fully in public life without being pressured to affirm views that contradict their convictions. When institutions signal that orthodox religious beliefs are uniquely disfavored or unacceptable, they undermine the very pluralism they claim to champion.”

As Closson reminded people, “The Biden-Harris administration was not merely indifferent to these concerns but actively contributed to a political and cultural climate in which traditional Christian moral convictions were treated as suspect, discriminatory, or beyond the bounds of respectable public discourse. By investigating whether religious believers have been subjected to discrimination or coercion, the Trump administration is reaffirming a foundational constitutional principle: religious liberty is not a government-granted exception to prevailing cultural norms, but a fundamental right,” he reiterated.

It’s easy, in the fog of Trump’s rants or mercurial decision-making, to forget the world we’d be living in under Harris. It wouldn’t be a world that defended Christians from the LGBT mob, for starters. So while it’s true that we’re paying more for gas and essentials right now, the reality is one we seem to forget: without this president, we’d be paying a lot steeper price in our freedoms.