No, Curt Schilling is not a free speech martyr.

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 about. But Schilling, at the time, very much affirmed ESPN's right and wisdom to take him off-air.

"I understand and accept my suspension. 100% my fault. Bad choices have bad consequences and this was a bad decision in every way on my part," he wrote.

So Schilling knew there was a line, and had affirmed his employer's right to hold that line.

I have no idea what Schilling's contract said, but if you're ESPN, you're not just paying Schilling for his opinions, but to express himself in a manner that's entertaining, insightful -- and, because it's a business, doesn't turn too many customers away at the door. Cause people to want to actually turn away from your product, and, well, you have a problem. ESPN is not in the business of supporting expression that makes it *harder* for the company to do business.

Listen: ESPN knew — everybody knew — that Schilling is a conservative when the network hired him. If it hated conservative expression so much, that move is impossible to imagine. It knew what it was getting.

So if Schilling had said something along the lines of: "I have concerns about sending my daughter to bathrooms with people who are born men and I support the North Carolina law," most likely he'd have his job, without changing the underlying substance of what he said. He might've caused an outcry; ESPN would've distanced itself from his remarks; maybe he'd have been given a warning of sorts. Bad enough, certainly. 

Instead, he chose to say it with one of the more grotesquely offensive, off-putting — and, yes, outlying — images possible. That there are consequences from his employer does not make him a free speeh martyr.

How to solve the problem of bathrooms and gender: Privacy for everybody!

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 the spots you’d expect, with muscles that God never quite chose to bestow upon me. Whichever nozzle I managed to claim, even briefly, was the one he decided should be his own.

Ever had to fight naked in the showers? There’s nothing good about it.

All this makes me think that we’re trying to answer the wrong question in the current debate over what bathrooms should be used by which people of which gender identities. The real question is this: Why do we expect people of any gender or orientations to place themselves in a situation where they might be regularly expected to see somebody else’s genitals — or be seen?

Why should anybody have to give up that privacy?

"How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk": Why I hope Bernie stays in the race a little longer.

The decision between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in next week's Pennsylvania primary has been a tough one for me — though my heart says "Bernie," my head says "Clinton," largely because I believe he can't deliver on his vision but that she can, at the very least, defend and cement Democratic gains of the last eight years.

But NYT Mag's story, "How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk" reminds me that I think she's shown some awful judgment on the foreign policy front, and it includes this — to me — chilling sentence:

Well then.

Here's my problem: That awful summation doesn't change my earlier assessment. But I'm not interested in supporting her hawkishness. What's a dovish lefty to do?

Root for Bernie to hang around a little longer, I think.

There's been some talk this week, after Clinton's win in the New York primaries, that Bernie should bow out for the greater good of the Democratic Party. I don't think that's true: Hillary stuck around in 2008 long past the point it seemed clear that Barack Obama would win the nomination, and he did fine in the general election.

The dynamics aren't quite the same this year, but: The longer Bernie sticks in the race and continues to attract significant support, the more Clinton gets the message — not all of us are on board with your entire agenda. It's something she needs to hear, I think.

In 2008, she lost the nomination when Obama ran to her left. Bernie's done the same thing this year and made securing the top spot more difficult than she imagined. Will that make a difference if she gets to the White House? I don't know. But it can't hurt.

About Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill....

Dems: Hey, you know, all the people on our currency are dead white dudes. Maybe we should put  a woman or somebody of color on the $10 bill.

Republicans: HOW DARE YOU! WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA'S FOUNDERS!?! IF YOU LOVE DIVERSITY SO MUCH, WHY DON'T YOU PUT A WOMAN OF COLOR ON THE $20 BILL INSTEAD OF THAT RACIST DEMOCRAT ANDREW JACKSON!!?!?!?!

Dems: OK.

Rs: ....

(The end.)

Air from Kobe Bryant's last game is being auctioned.

Shake. My. Head.

But that reminds me of an interesting factoid: "Every time you breathe, there’s a good chance that at least one of those molecules was exhaled by Julius Caesar in the throes of death."

The lesson: If you want some Kobe air, just ... wait awhile. You'll get it sooner or later.

Conservatives, cops, and crime: Three questions

Why do conservatives think it's contradictory to want police to both enforce the law and obey it?

Why do conservatives refer to Obamacare in the language of "tyranny" while rooting on the excesses of police?

Why do they think we refer to authoritarian regimes as "police states" and not as "universal health care states?"

Philly Bucket List: The Rocky Steps

We’ll be leaving Philadelphia to return to Kansas this summer: “Philadelphia Bucket List” is an occasional series of posts about what we’ll miss about this great city.

Everybody knows the Rocky Steps. Everybody who visits Philly has to visit the Rocky Steps. Why?

Do I really have to say? Because of this:

We visited soon after arriving in Philadelphia, of course. Everybody does. There's always somebody — often multiple somebodies — charging up the steps, then raising their fists in triumph at the top. Homeless guys hang out and offer to take pictures; there's a guy in a sweatshirt and porkpie hat, slightly Stallone-ish, who offers to be in the pictures.

None of that is why the Rocky Steps are on my list.

This is why:

Two months after my mom died in 2013, my dad came to visit us for the first time without her.

He and I walked and talked for a few days, stopping every now and again to sob. As deeply as I felt the loss, his pain (I know) was absolutely searing. One of our walks took us to the Philadelphia Museum of Art — we circled from the Schuylkill River Trail, on the back side, around to Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the steps in front.

I looked him, whipped out my cell phone, and told him to go.

And my father, deep in the earliest stages of widowerhood, bounded up the steps to the top, then raised his fists in triumph.


 That's when I knew we would survive.