EDITORIAL: Shunning Curt Schilling

OPINION:

Rewriting history was a full-time job in the old Soviet Union, with bureaucrats in the Kremlin staying up late to eliminate public figures from the nation’s collective memory, depending on whomever collided with a whim of the dictator of the day. Out-of-favor comrades of Lenin, Stalin and others were arrested, tried in kangaroo courts, and executed. Western analysts studied photographs of the annual May Day parade in Moscow to see who had vanished from history in the previous year.

We don’t do that in America, not yet, though Andrew Jackson was sent to the back of the $20 bill where he had resided for decades, to be replaced by a black woman who was an evangelical Methodist who never left home without her guns and even took them to the revival meetings she conducted. (The ACLU and the atheists are said to be working on it.) A dozen or so state attorneys general want to prosecute and imprison those who don’t share the media’s view of “climate change.” Mobs of hysteric revisionists demand that patriots and heroes of earlier generations be erased from public consciousness. Ecclesiastics who preach to empty pews want to spend a hundred thousand dollars to eliminate images of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson depicted at prayer in stained glass windows at the National Episcopal Cathedral in Washington. Where all this malignant nonsense stops none can say.

In the Soviet Union, the state enforced the politically correct, and in frightened modern America the corporate institutions do it for the state. Curt Schilling is a hero in Boston, remembered for his heroics as a pitcher for the Red Sox. Mr. Schilling was outspoken and opinionated, just what a sports page or a television network covets, and when he retired he was hired by ESPN. He first ran afoul of the ESPN owners when he compared the Islamic State, or ISIS, to the Nazis of Germany of yesteryear. This is a view widely held everywhere, except in the ESPN executive suites. Mr. Schilling was suspended. This year he crossed the line.

He remarked, not on the network but on social media, that in his opinion people who feel the call of nature should use the public restroom for which they are equipped by nature. ESPN executives didn’t agree with that, either, and sent the old pitcher to the showers, presumably in a shower of his choosing. This was dumb, but ESPN is a private company and it has the right to be both dumb and intolerant.

What happened next, however, could not have happened even in the Soviet Union of old. The network broadcast a special called “Four Days in October,” about the classic rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, and the American League playoff of 2004. Facing elimination in Game Six of the seven-game playoffs, the Sox sent Mr. Schilling to the mound, suffering a torn tendon in his right ankle. The team doctor patched up the ankle, but it bled throughout the game, with the blossoming blood stain clearly visible on his sock. The Sox won, anyway, and went on to win the World Series. The bloody sock became Red Sox legend. But the game was eliminated when ESPN broadcast “Four Days in October” by the order of ESPN managers, who explained that the game was running long and it had to cut something to avoid conflict with a previously scheduled softball game. The Soviets were clever fellows, but they never thought of an explanation as clever as that.