Former baseball analyst Curt Schilling, who was recently fired from ESPN because he spoke out against allowing biological men in women's bathrooms, has pointed out the hypocrisy of the move, revealing that "some of the biggest racists in sports commentating" work for his former employer.
"Some of the most racist things that I've ever heard come out of people that are on the air at ESPN," Schilling said during a "Breitbart News Patriot Forum" event for SiriusXM on Wednesday.
"There are some of the biggest racists in sports commentating, and you take it for what it is. You know who they are, you know what they are. I like that they are openly because then you know who they are. You know that they exist," he added.
ESPN terminated the contract of the former All-Star pitcher and on-air personality last week after he shared a controversial meme mocking those who oppose a recently-passed North Carolina law that prohibits local governments from forcing businesses to allow men who identify as female to use women's bathrooms.
According to Politico, underneath the since-deleted meme, 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."
"ESPN is an inclusive company," ESPN said in a statement announcing it had fired the baseball analyst. "Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated."
Speaking to Breitbart, Schilling said that at ESPN he was in the position of "being told what I can't say."
"It was apparent to me early on that if you wanted to go off topic as a sportsperson, you had to go off topic left or you were going to get into trouble," Schilling said.
"One of the things I got early on, people would walk up to me - we had the green room in ESPN, which I kind of turned it into a locker room where everything was on the table, you could make fun of anybody's mom and all the things that go with that, like in a baseball locker room - but I had people come up to me and go, 'Hey, I'm with ya, I'm a Republican, too.' It felt like, underground."
"It was like a deadly serious thing, like, we didn't talk... like religion on the table was a much easier discussion to have than who you voted for," Schilling said.
Speaking to conservative radio host Glenn Beck, Texas Senator Ted Cruz argued that ESPN fired Schilling, who had worked for the network since 2010, for making the "rather obvious point that we shouldn't allow grown male adult strangers alone in a bathroom with little girls."
"That's a point anyone who is rational should understand," Cruz said. "You have got the Obama education department suing to try to force [middle schools] to let teenage boys shower with teenage girls. That's crazy. That is not a reasonable position."
He added, "It is simply crazy and the idea that grown men would be allowed alone in a bathroom with little girls - you don't need to be a behavioral psychologist to realize bad things can happen and any prudent person wouldn't allow that. It is only the lunacy of political correctness."
