A good encapsulation of everything wrong with Disney's decision to can Gregg Easterbrook may be found here. For those of you who don't follow controversies in the blogosphere or on the pages of the New Republic, Easterbrook is a very fine writer, famous for his oft-contrarian work on environmental issues, religion, and, of all things, pro football, who used an unfortunate choice of words in a blogpost concerning the movie Kill Bill, which made it seem like he was anti-Semitic.

One of his targets in his post was Michael Eisner, long-time CEO of Disney, parent company of ESPN.com, which terminated Easterbrook's hilarious football column, "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" (ironically, Easterbrook had criticized Eisner, among others, for being a Jewish movie executive who had greenlighted the Tarentino bloodfest, presumably in contradiction to the religious tenets of Judaism; TMQ is famous for its soft-core descriptions of pro football cheerleaders, which is not entirely consistent with the religious beliefs of most Christians).

As with the controversy over Rush Limbaugh's remarks several weeks ago about Donovan McNabb, I feel the corporate reaction of purging the officious commentator only exacerbates the problem. Even though I view most charges of "political correctness" skeptically, as an excuse by others to justify racist opinions, it doesn't mean that the phenomenum doesn't exist. Censoring ill-phrased comments is appropriate, and Limbaugh and Easterbrook were rightly attacked for the remarks they made. I thought that Rush never should have been hired by ESPN in the first place, and I disagree with most of Easterbrook's takes on pro football (he seems to have an unhealthy obsession with the running game).

But forcing the offender into some public Maoist self-criticism ritual is precisely the wrong approach, one that guarantees that a large portion of the public is going to view such opinions as forbidden fruit, and speaking such opinions as courageous rather than bigoted. In particular, ESPN has apparently removed TMQ from its website altogether, and its football parade ads that were so ubiquitous at the beginning of the season have been all but pulled, due to the conspicuous participation of Mr. Limbaugh. Down the memory hole....

Once Limbaugh was hired, ESPN knew what it was going to get from him. His statement, while wrong in the specific (McNabb isn't overrated b/c he's black; he's overrated b/c he's a quarterback), was not racist per se, and is certainly no more outrageous than some of the things Howard Cosell used to say on MNF. He was hired for his opinions, and when he was wrong, Tom Jackson and Steve Young certainly had the right to stand up to him.

Many of the same people who jumped down Easterbrook's back on this case do not hesitate to impose similar criteria on Clarence Thomas every time a civil rights case is brought to the Supreme Court, or on Catholic politicians where the issue of abortion is concerned (or, for that matter, on Jewish writers concerning the domestic policy of Sharon). Political discourse in a free society often means saying something that does not sound pleasant to the ear, and when an attempt to do so goes awry, the speaker should be argued with, not bullied by the rest of us.