Curt Schilling fires back at ESPN over dismissal
Curt Schilling didn't wait long to fire back at ESPN after his dismissal from the network over transphobic comments he made on Facebook.
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"I'll always love talking about pitching," Schilling told Sirius XM's Breitbart News Daily host Stephen Bannon on Friday. "I thought I was good at it. But at a company where the rules are different based completely and solely on your perspective and your beliefs, it didn't work. They didn't like that."
ESPN on Wednesday fired Schilling from his role as an analyst on its Monday-night Major League Baseball broadcast following comments he wrote on Facebook. Those comments appeared to respond to critics of recent laws passed in North Carolina and other states restricting transgender men and women from using the public restrooms of their preference. Schilling earlier in the week shared a post featuring an image of a man in a wig with his breasts exposed, captioned, "LET HIM IN! to the restroom with your daughter or else you're a narrow-minded, judgmental, unloving racist bigot who needs to die."
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Schilling added the comment, "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."
Speaking to Bannon, Schilling said, "I'm not transphobic, I'm not homophobic." He added, "As long as you're not sleeping with my wife, I don't care who you sleep with."
ESPN announced Schilling's termination Wednesday after first saying that it would review his social-media comments. "ESPN is an inclusive company," the network said in a statement. "Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated."
Schilling had been previously reprimanded by the network for his social-media statements. He was suspended by ESPN last August for a tweet comparing Muslims to Nazis, in which he wrote, "It's said only 5-10% of Muslims are extremists. In 1940, only 7% of Germans were Nazis. How'd that go?"
