I sincerely hope your post is being sent in some form to the Mariners’ FO. Maybe if they start losing ticket sales (with specific explanations, otherwise they’ll just think people stopped going because of this horribly untalented team), they’ll listen.

I’m not arguing it’s appropriate to demand conformity to a Biblical standard in America (my right to worship as I see fit is essentially derived from a principle that suggests it’s not appropriate for me to demand others conform to my beliefs).

I’m simply arguing that those that apply such a Biblical standard in their personal daily lives are not bigots by default nor should it be assumed that they de facto discriminate against those which do not apply similar standards in their own lives.

Where this mother crossed the line was when she apparently used the usher to bully others into conforming to her ideals.

There were Bible verses used to justify every kind of racial discrimination as well, so you could argue that those views were/are “morally justified” for the same reasons anti-gay garbage is “morally justified.”

No.

Because people have misapplied Bible verses in the past does not invalidate all other moral judgements that might be based upon biblical teachings.

displays of affection are not appropriate in a public family setting

Does this rule refer to the whole ballpark or just the designated family seating areas, where you are not supposed to drink alcohol?

If you can present me with evidence to show that, I’m willing to rethink my position, but until then, I’m comfortable with making a reasonable judgment based on the information I do have.

Because the simple hypothesis of this being someone who thinks homosexuality should still be kept in closets is a lot more likely than the convoluted “but maybe” scenarios that people keep bringing up, and it frankly makes me a little queasy how willing people are to try to explain away her actions as “not really that big of a deal”, or even ACCEPTABLE.

So, in summation, it’s probably time for me to bow out of this comment thread.

We don’t know if she did or didn’t, though.

We know that the mother could’ve simply told her child to pay attention to the game, or that it’s not polite to worry about what other people are doing with each other.

Ditto.

We know, instead, that the mother chose to demand that Safeco Field personnel interfere on her behalf and embarass two people in public who weren’t doing anything that hetero couples don’t do in Safeco Field all the time.

We already agree that if she wanted the girls to stop because their behavior goes against her beliefs, she’s wrong. But that makes her wrong, not narrow-minded. You’re making a dispositional attribution (and a very broad one at that) based on a single incident. There’s no case to be made that she habitually discriminates against homosexuals, nor even that she’s prejudiced against them at all. She wants to raise her children a certain way and maybe she didn’t think about the situation as deeply as we are. There’s also no evidence that she “demanded” anything. She may have been extremely civil.