Saying that he stands for “inclusion
and acceptance,” Sean Doolittle, pitcher for the Washington
Nationals, says he'll skip the team's White House visit.
An LGBT ally, Doolittle, told The
Washington Post that he and his wife, who has two mothers,
disagree with a lot of President Donald Trump's policies.
“There’s a lot of things, policies
that I disagree with, but at the end of the day, it has more to do
with the divisive rhetoric and the enabling of conspiracy theories
and widening the divide in this country,” Doolittle said. “My
wife and I stand for inclusion and acceptance, and we’ve done work
with refugees, people that come from, you know, the ‘shithole
countries.' I want to show support for them. I think that’s an
important part of allyship, and I don’t want to turn my back on
them.”
“I have a brother-in-law who has
autism, and [Trump] is a guy that mocked a disabled reporter. How
would I explain that to him that I hung out with somebody who mocked
the way that he talked or the way that he moves his hands? I can’t
get past that stuff.”
“At the end of the day, as much as I
wanted to be there with my teammates and share that experience with
my teammates, I can’t do it,” Doolittle said. “I just can’t
do it. People say you should go because it’s about respecting the
office of the president. And I think over the course of his time in
office he’s done a lot of things that maybe don’t respect the
office.”
The Washington Nationals won the World
Series last week.