ESPN benches Curt Schilling for saying radical Islamic terrorists are a problem

I'm glad I don't work for ESPN, because I don't know how anyone can understand the rules there. If you're an on-air personality there, are you allowed to use your personal social media accounts to express opinions about non-sports matters? Yes? No? Or, as appears to be the case, are you permitted to do so as long as someone doesn't arbitrarily decide after the fact that what you said was "controversial" and thus unacceptable?

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That appears to be the trap Curt Schilling stuck his foot in yesterday, and as an added bonus, you're really in trouble if you say one thing but the media insists you said something else. It appears Schilling realized quickly that was likely to happen after he tweeted the following image, because he quickly deleted it. But too late. People who hate Schilling saw it and captured the image, and thus his trouble was underway. For this, ESPN has yanked Schilling from his current gig doing color commentary on the Little League World Series - a move driven in part by a complete misrepresentation of what the image says:

ESPN announced Tuesday the network had removed Curt Schilling from its Little League broadcasts because of a tweet he sent earlier that day (and later deleted) that compared Muslims as a group to Nazi Germany of the 1940s. You can see a screen capture here of the tweet, which includes an image of Adolf Hitler, along with some dubious statistics. Probably not the best choice in several ways for Schilling, a Red Sox, Phillies and Diamondbacks great who has said he considers himself a conservative Christian on political, social and moral issues.

Now let's consider this notion that Schilling "compared Muslims as a group to Nazi Germany". Is that what he did? Not at all. The comparison in the image invovles two sets and two correspondsing subsets. The sets are Muslims and Germans, not Muslims and Nazis. Schilling's point is that Muslims and Germans are similar in that only a small subset of each are problems - terrorists in the case of Muslims and Nazis in the case of Germans. Far from generalizing all Muslims as being like Nazis, Schilling is doing exactly the opposite. He's acknowledging that most Muslims are not terrorists at all, while also pointing out that a small percentage of a large group can still be a very big problem. Nazi Germany is the object lesson that should teach us that, and this is all Schilling is saying. But the dishonest media quickly jumped on the tweet and claimed it was something else, and ESPN - which has taken on a political hypersensitivity in recent years - quickly came down on him for it. Despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing wrong with what Schilling tweeted, he obviously realizes (and did so quickly) that he has run afoul of ESPN's fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants rules, and decided to grovel for lack of a better way forward: I actually don't think ESPN is liberal per se. I think ESPN is scared of liberals, particularly the ones who will raise a ruckus anytime someone says something they don't like. Their path of least resistance is to muzzle anyone who might raise that ire, and that's why Schilling got smacked down here. The whole notion of freedom of speech in America has turned into a wild west operation. The government may not prosecute you for what you say, but it hardly matters. Anyone who decides to work hard enough at it will see to it that you will pay a price if they don't like what you say, and those who should be at the forefront of protecting free speech liberty are the first to cower at the threat.