ESPN fired baseball analyst Curt Schilling for maintaining that males don’t belong in the women’s room and females don’t belong in the men’s room.
“ESPN is an inclusive company,” network spokesman Josh Krulewitz strangely claimed after excluding the former World Series co-MVP. “Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated.”
Schilling’s speech, not his conduct, resulted in his termination. The former pitcher shared a picture posted by another Facebook user showing a hideous, overweight man trying to pass himself off as a woman. The internet meme obliquely referenced North Carolina’s law restricting multiple-use public restrooms in government buildings to people whose biology matches the insignia on the entrance.
“A man is a man no matter what they call themselves,” Schilling noted about the push to force states to approve of transgenders using the public restrooms of the opposite sex. “I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the penis, women’s not so much,” he opined. “Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.”
The pitcher previously ran afoul of the Disney-owned company after comparing Islamists to Nazis and saying Hillary Clinton belongs in the big house rather than the White House. The network suspended him late last season, and received pressure to fire him after his subsequent criticism of Clinton, admission that he financially supported Dr. Ben Carson’s presidential campaign, and his popular but politically incorrect stance that biology rather than identity should determine the public restrooms people use.
Articles at SBNation, OutSports, and SportingNews quickly called on ESPN to fire him after he offered his opinion on opening up the ladies’ room to males imagining themselves as women. Sports commissar Jesse Spector deemed the 3,000 strikeout club member as guilty of “transphobia” at the nation’s oldest athletics publication, and dubbed ESPN keeping him on the air a “tacit endorsement of the darkness he brings.”
Schilling posted on his blog before the ax fell that he held no ill will toward transgenders but expressed contempt for people who feign offense to ideas with which they disagree. The beleaguered former big leaguer declared: “You frauds out there ranting and screaming about my ‘opinions’ (even if it isn’t) and comments are screaming for ‘tolerance’ and ‘acceptance’ while you refuse to do and be either.”