the organization absolutely does not have a responsibility to protect players from the consequences of their bigotry.

Teams have been wearing pride jerseys for a long time, it's not like this is a new initiative for this season. I could be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge, no Russian player has been slapped by Putin for wearing a pride jersey in a team initiative pride night (if anyone has any examples to the contrary, please let me know). The fact that it's now appearing as a "choice" and something that players can just opt out of it and the onus is shifted to the team to "protect" them by saying "okay guess we just won't wear them at all, we wouldn't want this one guy to look bad" is absolutely unacceptable. When it wasn't optional, they could participate and have deniability back home - just doing what the club requires of them. Making it optional, caving to the hatred, puts the risk back on the players, because now, if a team does have a pride jersey night, you know how that looks? Looks like none of the Russian guys on the team put their foot down hard enough! This isn't protecting anybody. It's taking away this teensy, tiny little thing that teams did as a show of support, and now we don't even get that because a couple of assholes decided they needed to use their chosen religion as an excuse to be bigots.