(former Giants 2B Jeff Kent was unavailable for comment)

While the Mets received a mild rebuke from this corner yesterday for their cowardly refusal to take part in the It Gets Better anti bashing campaign, ironically enough, the supportive SF Giants are, in the words of Faster Times’ Lincoln Mitchell, expecting home fans to believe “the city’s sizeable gay community includes no baseball fans,”, citing the complete lack of any same-sex couples playing tonsil hockey during AT&T Park’s Kiss Cam entertainment. Such a policy, writes Mitchell, runs contrary to the Giants’ track record of being “on the cutting edge of gay/lesbian issues.” (link swiped from Repoz and Baseball Think Factory)

The obvious logistical challenge associated with featuring same sex couples on the Kiss Cam is that there are a lot of men who attend games together who are not couples; and the camera operators at the ballpark should not be in the business of trying to determine who is gay and who is not.  This, however, is more of an excuse than a legitimate reason to discriminate against same sex couples.  It is also, of course, true that not every man and woman sitting next to each other feel like kissing simply because a camera is on them.  During a recent game I attended among the couples on screen were a man and a woman who appeared to be siblings and were not interested in kissing each other, as well as a couple that appeared to have been caught onscreen in the middle of an argument and were also disinclined to kiss, but this did not discourage the Kiss Cam from showing more man and woman couples.  Accordingly, it would be easy enough for two men who were put on the screen by the Kiss Cam but did not want to kiss to simply wave at the camera.

If these solutions prove unworkable and the logistical obstacles remain insurmountable, which  they should not, the Giants should simply cancel the Kiss Cam.  Preserving a silly piece of between inning entertainment, or letting policy be dictated by modest logistical issues, should be far less important for the team and the ballpark than treating all Giant fans equally.