After Curt Schilling was fired over yet another offensive Facebook post, Fox News convened a “fair and balanced” panel in which two of the three guests complained that ESPN was being too politically correct.
Here’s how The New York Times described Schilling’s post which was, apparently, a commentary on the North Carolina “bathroom law” that mandates people use the bathroom corresponding to their birth gender:
The post showed an overweight man wearing a wig and women’s clothing with parts of the T-shirt cut out to expose his breasts. It says: “LET HIM IN! to the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow-minded, judgmental, unloving racist bigot who needs to die.”
To that, Schilling added: “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the penis, women’s not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.”
Media Matters has a 2015 roundup of some of Schilling’s other extremely offensive Facebook posts so it’s no surprise that ESPN finally fired him.
But to two out of the three Fox guests, Schilling is a conservative victim whose free speech is being stifled.
In his introduction, host Neil Cavuto “just asked,” “A lot of folks are asking why now, why this, and are we too politically correct? In other words, are we going too far?”
Carly Shimkus, of Fox News Headlines 24/7 was the only guest who defended ESPN. “We certainly do live in a world that is way too politically correct, but even if we didn’t, Curt Schilling should have been fired for this comment,” she said. “He went way over the line, his comment was crude, and quite frankly, not his place. He was hired at ESPN to talk sports, not weigh in on political or social issues.”
But internet radio host Mike Gunzelman called the firing part of “the wussification of our society.” He complained, “Whether it’s feminists or any of these whack-job groups, you can’t say anything anymore. It’s true.”
Cavuto furthered the “conservative victim” meme by asking the third guest, Emily Jashinsky of the conservative Young America’s Foundation, whether Schilling would have gotten “the same treatment” if he had spoken the same way about Donald Trump or a conservative cause.
“No, of course not,” Jashinsky assured the viewers. She said that “what’s really scary” is anyone thinking that what Schiling posted was offensive. “That’s what’s truly horrifying, because he said a man is a man. That’s what his Facebook post says,” Jashinsky insisted.
That was too much even for Cavuto. He noted that the problem was the cartoon and the way Schilling said what he did.
“He’s a repeat offender,” Shimkus chimed in. “He should have known this was coming.”
But Jashinsky didn’t care. She said the decision to fire Schilling by the “media elitists” at ESPN was “an act of contempt to their audience, because their audience believes in what Curt Schilling believes.”
How does she know? Did she take a poll? I think not.
Gunzelman piled on. “The thing is, now we’re seeing that anytime a company even smells anything that could possibly go wrong, or some fringe group out there going after them, they go over the top to overcompensate for this, and it’s literally destroying society as we see it.”
Watch it below, from the April 21 Your World, via Media Matters.