Craig James, former SMU running back and failed U.S. Senate candidate, has managed to alienate an impressively broad swath of humanity, including but not limited to Texas Tech fans, sex workers, the entire LGBT community, Republican primary voters, and the executives of now two major sports networks.
The second of those networks, Fox Sports, is now openly acknowledging that it fired James after a single appearance for comments made during his Senate campaign on homosexuality, such as his assertion that gay people will have to "answer to the Lord for their actions."
"We just asked ourselves how Craig's statements would play in our human resources department," a Fox spokesman told The Dallas Morning News "He couldn't say those things here."
See also: Fox Sports Fires Craig James, Failed Senate Candidate and Alleged Hooker Killer, After One Show
One place where James is perfectly welcome to say those things is the arch-conservative Family Research Council, which views James as yet another martyr sacrificed at the altar of political correctness. In a column Tuesday, founder Tony Perkins writes that James was sacked for being an "outspoken Christian" and calls James "the latest face of the war on religious liberty."
Dr. Angela McCaskill, Jerry Buell, Julea Ward, Damian Goddard, Senior Master Sergeant Phillip Monk, Crystal Dixon, and Air National Guardsman Layne Wilson certainly think so. To a man, they were all suspended, fired, or sued by their employers for their views on marriage -- whether or not they expressed them at work! Like them, Craig James's ousting had nothing to do with his job performance -- and everything to do with this new climate of Christian persecution.
Perkins' argument would be more convincing if Fox Sports' decision to dismiss an extremely visible employee who made inflammatory comments, and whose hiring reportedly hadn't been approved by network higher-ups in the first place, didn't seem so reasonable. Or if the idea of anti-Christian persecution in a Jesus-drenched America weren't so laughable. Or if Perkins hadn't identified James as a "popular analyst."
If that were true, he wouldn't have so much trouble finding a job.
