Curt Schilling, legendary MLB pitcher turned baseball analyst and bigoted Facebook-meme-connoisseur, finally got canned by ESPN last week. “ESPN is an inclusive company. Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated,” said ESPN in an official statement.
Curt Schilling responded to his firing by getting offended and writing a terrible blog about how offended he is.
The irony.
His latest act of stupidity involved him sharing a transphobic meme on Facebook that conveyed the perceived image that trans people are dangerous predators, that allowing them to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity is a sign of our decaying moral fabric, and that trans individuals will seize the opportunity to prey on children and women in public restrooms.
There are, of course, no recorded instances of these types of things actually occurring, but North Carolina passed a bill last month stemming from these types of fears anyway. It was largely decried as bigoted, in the same way religious freedom bills are also being criticized.
This isn’t the first time Curt has made an ass of himself publicly either, as he was suspended eight months ago for sharing a meme that juxtaposed Muslims with Nazis. Two months ago he said Hillary Clinton should be “buried under a jail somewhere.” It is a miracle, frankly, that ESPN allowed him to hang around this long, but that is a different story entirely.
The irony here is, of course, this: Man says offensive and bigoted thing. Man receives public backlash for saying offensive thing. Man gets angry and upset about backlash citing “PC Culture and over-sensitivity of people.” Hmmm, irony abounds. Middle-aged white men getting offended by criticism of their own insensitive comments is about as comical as it gets, and yet, the humor is lost when you realize there are countless people besides Curt Schilling who also possess identical, illogical views that allowed the law in North Carolina to get passed in the first place.
It would be one thing for Curt to own up to his mistakes of dehumanizing and degrading people he sees as different from him, because maybe that would allow him to gain some insight into something other than his warped view of the world. But it’s another thing entirely for him to double down on his insensitive comments and whine about his own self-induced debasing. It takes such an astonishing lack of self-awareness that likely only Donald Trump or Mike Pence could rival, and his firing was warranted, if not totally inevitable. With a track record of sharing awful memes like Curt's, it was only a matter of time.
