James Reimer: Good guy, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer

I'm convinced the San Jose Sharks goalie's actions Saturday night were not borne out of homophobia or hate. They came from good, old-fashioned ignorance

San Jose Sharks goalie James Reimer sat out the warm-up Saturday night because the prospect of wearing a Pride sweater conflicted with his beliefs.

The first thing that needs to be said here is that James Reimer had every right to refuse to participate in the warm-up Saturday night if it meant him having to wear a special San Jose Sharks Pride sweater. And others have the right to look at and comment on the total hypocrisy of it all and come to the conclusion that James Reimer is actually a loveable and well-meaning dolt.

Nobody is cancelling anybody here.

Unlike many people out there, I do not believe the San Jose Sharks’ stopper – insert joke about Reimer’s 10-17-7 record and .895 save percentage here – is a raging homophobe or that his actions were borne out of hatred or malice toward the LBGTQ community. Reimer is staying true to his beliefs and in his heart believes he has done the right thing. That takes a certain amount of courage to be sure, because he had to know there was going to be an enormous amount of blowback after this.

Reimer’s actions were borne out of good old ignorance, a stunning lack of perspective and an inability to realize that the cherry-picking from the Old Testament he is citing as his moral compass is an incredibly slippery slope. (Good thing the Bible doesn’t say: “Thou shalt not gag up a three-goal lead to the Bruins in the third period of Game 7,” or he’d be sentenced to eternal damnation.) Reimer may or may not know that same-sex relations are hardly mentioned in the Bible and that Jesus never mentions homosexuality in its pages, nor does He seem to care much about the sex lives of the people at the time. But where Reimer really exposed himself as less-than-enlightened came when he dragged former Toronto Maple Leafs teammate Nazem Kadri into the morass, saying that Kadri would almost certainly vouch for his character. And that’s precisely where Reimer and his argument went completely off the rails.

“People would understand if I wouldn’t be able to wear a Muslim jersey in warm-ups, promoting the Muslim faith, being a Christian and a fellow in Christ,” Reimer told reporters. “(Kadri) himself would fully understand that.”

James Reimer actually said that. And that tells you all you need to know about how clueless he really is. And that’s actually a good thing because, in a way, it takes this problem off hockey’s plate a little bit and puts it into perspective. NHL teams are going to continue to hold Pride Nights and they’re going to continue to hit these obstacles that make everyone uncomfortable, but what Reimer has really shown us is that the outdated beliefs of one player should not cancel out all the good that the game is trying to do with these events.

As for Reimer’s assertion that he couldn’t comply with the Sharks’ request because it conflicted with his Bible teachings, I consulted with a man by the name of Rev. Michael Coren, a former conservative Catholic and outspoken commentator who became a liberal Anglican (Episcopalian for American readers) and was later ordained as an Anglican priest. He also wrote a book titled Epiphany: A Christian’s Change of Heart & Mind Over Same-Sex Marriage. (Rev. Coren tweeted about the issue and received some rather un-Christian responses, all of which he handled with humour and aplomb.)

“You’ve got to remember that the Old Testament scriptures were written a very long time ago and they say lots of things you wouldn’t dream of applying in the modern world,” Rev. Coren said. “Slavery, compulsory circumcision, selling your daughters into servitude, ethnic cleansing. These Mosaic Laws were written to preserve people at a specific time. Jesus never mentions it. St. Paul does, but if you read carefully, he’s not talking about same-sex relationships. He talks about men using young boys. Even if you believe in the traditional conservative interpretation of it, it’s not a central issue. It’s very much a fringe issue.”

Rev. Coren pointed out that the poor are mentioned about 2,000 times in the Bible and perhaps we might want to be more concerned with that issue rather than whom people choose to love. When you understand the Bible in context, he said, much of what was written was to spread the message of the importance of procreation, which is why masturbation is condemned. Rev. Coren doesn’t want to make Reimer into a victim here, but said there is a huge inconsistency in his argument. “And I blame the people who are teaching these people,” Coren said. “I think there are some very sinister people behind it.”

As an aside, I’m not much of a scriptures guy. I look at it basically as Jewish mythology that has some very good lessons and some terrible ones. A lapsed Catholic, I thought it was important for my two young boys to be exposed to a faith environment so, about 20 years ago, we decided as a family to join a faith community and we chose St. Nicholas Birch Cliff Anglican Church in Scarborough. I still attend and am active in the church, but to say it really didn’t take was an understatement. My wife only attends with me occasionally and I think my kids are both atheists, at the very least agnostics. But all of us learned many lessons of love by being there and many of them were learned from a priest by the name of Kevin Robertson, who went on to become the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Church of Canada. I reached out the man I referred to as ‘Rev Kev’ for this piece, but didn’t hear back, which I understand. He probably has to tread carefully around land mines such as this one.

In that same church this past Sunday, I had the privilege of listening to the homily from our current priest at St. Nick’s, the Rev. Andrew MacDonald. (Full disclosure: I was part of the leadership group that hired him and I really like him.) He talked about how, earlier in his career, he served as the chaplain at a faith-based school and said the families that seemed to like him most were the ones of non-Christian faiths. “On the other hand, the families that were the most suspicious of me were the Christian families,” Rev. Andrew said. “Yes, I was a Christian, but was I their kind of Christian? Did I believe the right things?”

He went on to talk about some of the parts of scripture that must keep theology students up tossing and turning at night trying to reconcile. Some of those stories have provided the root for anti-Semitism and hate. “It’s not a pretty part of our history,” Rev. Andrew went on to say. “That the lines we draw around each other and our camps and groups only stand in the way of the grace that God has shown us, (a) God who offers us compassionate and limitless grace, without asking, ‘Yes, but are you my kind of person?’ But how damaging has it been when we take that protectionist mentality, and turn it against the most vulnerable, the most in need of healing and justice?”

James Reimer has his interpretation of the scripture. I choose to follow those offered by people such as Rev. Andrew MacDonald. I’m actually encouraged by the fact that when my kids were attending public school, they were both genuinely equal parts perplexed and dumbfounded by the fact that someone’s sexual orientation would ever have been an issue, ever. That’s a long way to come in just one generation. We’ll get there, someday.