BRISTOL, Connecticut, April 21, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – ESPN has fired retired star pitcher Curt Schilling from his role as an analyst over a post on his private Facebook account skewering the politically correct position on transgender restrooms.
Schilling posted a picture of a man wearing a wig that said: “LET HIM IN! to the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow-minded, judgmental, unloving racist bigot who needs to die.”
He added his own comment, saying the picture represented “my opinion, 100% mine, and only mine. I don’t represent anyone but myself here, on Facebook, on Twitter, anywhere.”
That was not sufficient to keep his job. ESPN fired Schilling on Wednesday.
“ESPN is an inclusive company,” the company said in a statement. “Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable, and his employment with ESPN has been terminated.”
Pro-family leaders say the firing is an attempt to quash dissent on a growing PC cause.
“Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling is used to throwing people out – not being thrown out,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told LifeSiteNews. “The idea that any father wouldn’t want his daughter to share a restroom with a grown man was too much for the sports network, who sent the MLB record-holder to 'the showers.'”
“Obviously, Schilling was targeted because he expressed politically incorrect views,” Perkins said. “Is it really so radical to suggest that people select the restroom or locker room that matches their anatomy, so as not to violate the privacy and even safety of the other 99.5 percent of society?”
Traditional Values Coalition president Andrea Lafferty said ESPN's actions actually “reinforce what Schilling shared on social media”: that there is no tolerance for anyone who dissents from the latest gender theories.
“While some say the picture and post could have been more artfully communicated, Schilling is obviously as bewildered as the rest of us at this fast-speed train of gender lunacy,” Perkins told LifeSiteNews.
Lafferty believes Schilling's ouster is being used as “an example” to anyone who would buck social liberalism. “If pressure can be brought to bear on public figures, the intent is to intimidate the rest of the American public into silence,” she said.
But that same standard is not being brought to bear on other sports broadcasters.
“Of course, ESPN didn’t seem to mind when Tony Kornheiser compared the Tea Party to ISIS in September,” Perkins told LifeSiteNews.
The network also invited Keith Olbermann back on the air after voicing years' of left-leaning commentary on his MSNBC program, much of it ad hominem.
Schilling has been on thin ice with network executives before, when he likened ISIS to the Nazis. But he has taken the consequences of voicing his convictions as they come.
“Obviously, my Lord and Savior is the reason I’m here,” he told Breitbart in January. “The one thing I try to tell people is don’t ever live your life to make people who will never meet you think good of you.”
“No one should have to act or speak or be a certain way for other people to approve,” he said. “But that’s the world we live in.”