The woke politics of Megan Rapinoe and the U.S. women’s national soccer team (USWNT) may have kept one of the best players in the country off the squad — because she’s a Christian.
Jaelene Hinkle, who has been described as the best left-back in the nation, was cut from the USWNT in 2018. As Rapinoe uses her victory lap to bash the president and agitate for left-wing causes, some are speculating that Hinkle’s Christian beliefs played a role in her exclusion, according to Fox News, the Washington Times, and The Irish Times.
“If we were talking about just any player, it wouldn’t be really clear,” John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, said. “But just because of her abilities — Jaelene Hinkle is a heck of a player — it makes it that much more suspect.”
Making the team
The Colorado native is a defender for the North Carolina Courage of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), and in 2018 her team won the NWSL championship. Hinkle was regarded as one of the best defenders in U.S. women’s soccer when the women’s national team mysteriously dropped her in 2018, The Irish Times reported in June.
The team’s openly gay coach, Jill Ellis, said the decision had everything to do with soccer, not politics. But there were signs of a clash brewing between Hinkle and the women’s national team in 2017 when Hinkle rejected an invite to play two games after learning that the team would wear rainbow Gay Pride-themed jerseys. Hinkle said that she made her decision after praying for guidance.
“I just felt so convicted in my spirit that it wasn’t my job to wear this jersey,” she told the Christian Broadcasting Network’s The 700 Club in a May 2018 interview. “I gave myself three days to just seek and pray and determine what [God] was asking me to do in this situation.”
Shortly after the interview, the Colorado native was jeered by Pride-flag waving spectators in super-left-wing Portland, Oregon when she played a match there for the North Carolina Courage. And in 2015, Hinkle again made herself a target when she expressed open opposition to the Supreme Court’s ruling to legalize gay marriage in an Instagram post.
“I believe with every fiber in my body that what was written 2,000 years ago in the Bible is undoubtedly true,” Hinkle wrote on Instagram at the time. “This world may change, but Christ and His Word NEVER will.”
Last year, Ellis called up Hinkle to play in the Tournament of Nations, but cut her three days into training. The circumstances have left some to speculate that Ellis’ invite was a ploy to avoid a religious discrimination lawsuit, The Irish Times noted.
A black sheep on a “woke” team
But whether Hinkle was snubbed because of her religious views or not, her faith would surely have made her a black sheep on a team that moonlights as left-wing activists, and whose coach and star player are openly lesbian.
For her part, forward Rapinoe has become a folk hero on the left for snubbing the national anthem and criticizing President Donald Trump. Like former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, Rapinoe has leveraged her platform as an athlete to agitate for social justice causes, like the LGBT movement and alleged pay gap between male and female players.
“Your message is excluding people. You’re excluding me. You’re excluding people that look like me. You’re excluding people of color,” Rapinoe told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday.
In May, Rapinoe said that her refusal to acknowledge the anthem is an “‘F’ you” to Trump, according to the Daily Caller, and in June the soccer icon posed nude with her girlfriend, WNBA star Sue Bird, on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Rapinoe’s Women’s World Cup victory has been greeted with loud applause in the liberal media, for political reasons as much as for the victory itself. But if Hinkle were with the USWNT, she likely would have faced scrutiny from the left for being included in an otherwise uniformly liberal roster.
Indeed, with left-wing politics becoming inseparable from entertainment and sports — and anti-Christian prejudice becoming a more obvious fact of life throughout the Western world — Christians can’t be blamed for seeing politics at play in this case.
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