Joel Mathis

Some angry talk these days from my conservative friends about ESPN's firing of famed pitcher Curt Schilling after Schilling posted some anti-transgender comments to social media the other day. "Progressive America is sending a message," National Review's David French wrote . "In the institutions it controls, there is no distinction between the personal and professional. Keep dissent to yourself. All your words belong to your boss." I don' think that's quite the lesson to draw here. This is what Curt Schilling posted: It's a distasteful, near-pornographic image — one that, even if it said something like AMERICA IS THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD or VOTE FOR BERNIE SANDERS might've caused most people a bit of faint-heartedness. Now, understand too: Schilling had already been suspended last fall for THIS post: Too me, the sentiment is objectionable without being pornographic. This is the incident I might've criticized ESPN a

My memories of sixth grade: Moving to a new town, starting middle school, and being herded into group showers with a bunch of naked boys I’d just met. It’s not a pleasant memory. After a lifetime of being educated on modesty, I suddenly found myself thrust into the most immodest of situations: The requirement that we take showers at the end of our P.E. classes. The boy’s locker room at my new middle school was cramped and had one big shower with a half-dozen nozzle for considerably more than a half-dozen boys. Exacerbating the discomfort? Some of us were hitting puberty faster than others. Some of us, like me, were hitting it a little later. That wasn’t the only upsetting feature of the experience. There was the kid who, after showering, put his socks on before putting his underwear. Who does that? Worse yet: My experience with an older kid — I think he’d been held back at least once — who had, to my tender eyes, the body of man: He loomed over me, freakishly hairy in all