ESPN Host Calls Rays Players Bigots for Refusing Pride Patches

CLAY: Buck, I know that you are not a fan of the baseball necessarily in a big way, but it’s a big story —

BUCK: I like the modifier: “In a big way.”

CLAY: The Tampa Bay Rays — we have a big audience down in Tampa. We appreciate all of you listening. And all over the state of Florida, where a lot of you are listening every single day — have five players who have refused to wear the Pride flag. I have talked — I think I’ve stunned you — by pointing out what I’ve experienced, which is that the sports media is far more left-wing than even the national media. I think you’ve come to see it on some level.

BUCK: Can I just say, I sort of doubted when you said that, but deferred to your considerable expertise. And it does seem that is true, which is hard to believe coming from political news media because they’re all libs. But in the sports media, it is like they’re all communists. It’s crazy.

CLAY: It really is unbelievable. So, ESPN used to be a sports network. You would turn it on. You could pop a beer. You could see who won a game. They have a show called Around the Horn, which has been on for some 20-odd years. They bring on sportswriters, sports media members to weigh in on the biggest issues of the day in the world of sports.

A lot of times it’s arguing, “Hey, Tom Brady is unretired. What does it mean for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers going forward?” It’s sports-related discussion. But whenever there’s an opportunity to go far left-wing — even when it really doesn’t involve sports, necessarily — they do it. And I want to play this cut for you, Buck. This is a woman named Sarah Spain, who is on Around the Horn.

She’s a far left-wing advocate who uses sports. She doesn’t really, to my knowledge… She never has had an interesting opinion in actual sports, right? You can criticize people and say, hey, these guys are in sports but if you’re Stephen A. Smith or Colin Cowherd — Skip Bayliss, Shannon Sharpe, all these different guys — they actually have interesting sports opinions.

I’ve never heard her have an interesting sports opinion. She is basically just a left-wing agenda person who uses sports as an opportunity to advocate for far left-wing opinions. She said all of those Tampa Bay Rays players are bigots. Nobody pushed back against it. This aired yesterday on ESPN. I’m not making it up on their main programming, listen.

CLAY: This is sports, Buck! Now, you can have whatever opinion you want, if that was MSNBC, if that was CNN. This is, “Hey, I sat down. I popped a beer. What are the stories of the world of sports?” That was on ESPN! Nobody pushed back against it one iota. She called these players bigots, and she lectured everybody about left-wing politics embedded right in ESPN programming.

BUCK: I guess talking to her about the First Amendment, about compelled speech, about any of those things, is probably a giant waste of time, right?

CLAY: To a large extent. But at least you could argue — somebody could come back and say — “Hey, let’s have a conversation. Somebody could take the other side.” They didn’t. By the way, nobody wants to watch this on ESPN programming. If they wanted to put it on MSNBC or CNN or even Fox News, you could have a conversation about it. You just heard her entire rant. That is all direct politics broadcast by ESPN.

BUCK: Yeah, the politics —

CLAY: Are you stunned? If you didn’t do this show with me and you were doing a politics show and somebody shared you that audio, I listened to it and I am stunned that ESPN has allowed their programming to get to a place where that sounds normal on a day-to-day basis.

BUCK: Well, anti-Christian bigotry — or I should say, antitraditional Christian or believing, practicing Christian bigotry — is completely acceptable, and I would argue almost compulsory in many parts of the media. You can say whatever you want about Christian belief and get away with it.

CLAY: She called it BS on the ESPN programming.

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: And we’re probably the only place that’s going to be, like, “Hey, this is crazy. This actually happened.” This is the kind of soft indoctrination that they try to use sports to make it so that you can’t even question it.

BUCK: There’s been a progression that’s really been going on for very clearly at least — you could stretch it beyond this, but for — the last 20 years. In the last 10 years, I would say, the progression, the velocity, the speed has accelerated even more. And it has gone from calls for tolerance to acceptance to celebration. Tolerance would be, “You do your thing; I do my thing.”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Acceptance is “your thing is good; my thing is good, but we can choose our own things that we are going to do.” Celebration is your thing, whatever it is, again speaking in general terms here, “Your thing is amazing. I love your thing,” and if you’re not willing to say that you actually find yourself the target here. It has happened very rapidly. You’re now expected on a whole range of issues from the leftist perspective, including, she’s talking about wearing a Pride pin.

I think a lot of people are sitting around saying, “Okay, let’s have a conversation about what’s going on specifically with the trans agenda and the LGBTQIA community never ending letters,” and I say this in all honesty. At some point, an acronym is absurd. And the acronym has become absurd in terms of length. It’s too long. Should we have a 30-letter acronym, folks? It has gotten absurd.

I actually do believe that, by the way, that the activist community that pushes this stuff likes that it’s so long because if you can say it quickly enough, it shows that you’re almost… It’s like you know the secret handshake, so to speak. But also, for other people, they get to watch them stumble over it and they get to watch them cringe at the thought of, “Did I leave out one of the letters?”

They’re adding letters all the time. So there’s a lot about this that I think when you start to look at it, there should be some interesting conversations about, “Well, why has the left been able to take the trans agenda and the trans agenda for children and completely really co-opt the gay and lesbian community’s struggle for what they view — or what is viewed under the constitutional interpretation under Obergefell — as equal rights?”

These things have been pushed in together, and it’s not so clear that they should be pushed in together at all in that way. But obviously this woman just wants to get the virtue-signaling points for making everybody, for one, bashing Christians — you get virtue points for that — and, two, you wear the Pride flag. Wasn’t there a Seinfeld episode?

CLAY: You wear the ribbon. Need the audio on that. You wear the ribbon, or you hate gay people basically.

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: It was a joke. They were playing it for laughs, in the ’90s, because you would either wear the ribbon or you wouldn’t. This is unfortunately where we are now: “You better wear the ribbon!” I would also point out, when you analyze this, to me it’s emblematic of the scope of expansion, to your point, on how exactly gay rights and transgender rights are expected now.

At some point, when you get to the full fruition of this demand, it is demanding that you give up what you believe in. And we’re seeing it right now in the world of sports, which is why I believe it’s such a perfect metaphor of the larger issue. If someone is man and identifies as a woman, they are telling you that they get to compete as a woman. As a result, they are excluding women from being able to compete actually in women’s athletics.

So, you’re talking about something that is being sold as an inclusive issue. Right? “Oh, we just have to allow these people to have their normal life.” But the inclusion at some point leads to exclusion. Meaning, if you are a woman who would otherwise be standing on a medal stand for finishing first, second or third and you don’t because a biological man has taken your spot, their inclusion is excluding you. And at some point, you’re at loggerheads there and you have to make a choice, because the full expansion of inclusiveness destroys women’s athletics; it excludes women from being able to compete in women’s championships.

BUCK: It’s a similar paradigm with the constant demand from the left — not just on this issue, whole range of issue — for tolerance.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They demand tolerance and always create, in that demand, their intolerance of those who don’t want to go along. So it’s never actually, “Everyone’s allowed to think what they think, feel what they feel, be who they are; it’s this goes in the category of what you are supposed to tolerate and we will not tolerate you who do not go along.”

CLAY: You’re actually a bigot if you don’t wear the flag, a bigot. That’s what they said on ESPN. These players and their religious beliefs, whatever they might be, are BS. That’s what they said on ESPN. You’re a bigot and your religious beliefs are BS if you don’t wear the flag. By the way, the players came out said, by the way, “We aren’t saying you can’t. We just don’t feel like our uniform, we need to be wearing a Pride flag on it,” five of them, which is far braver, Buck, than meekly acquiescing, which a huge percentage of athletes would do because they’re afraid of getting called bigots because they know what ESPN will do to them.

BUCK: Also, this gets to the compelled-speech issue. I know privately compelled speech as opposed to government compelled, but still being forced even in a corporate setting to go along with what is clearly… Look, it is political. They can say it’s not political, that it’s human rights or whatever, but it is political. And to force your employees to do that is, well, an escalation in the culture wars that we see underway.

The only time I’ve ever worn… Some people like to wear flag pins. I’m not a flag pin guy. The only time I put a flag on was when I was overseas for my country in war zones. Full stop. Now, I’m not criticizing. I’m just saying it’s not my thing. I don’t wear a flag pin. People ask, “When you go on TV, why don’t you wear a flag pin?” I don’t wear pin. I’m not a pin guy.

CLAY: You would have been the worst restaurant employee when it came to flare.

BUCK: I would not have had enough flare at whatever that place was.

CLAY: TGI Fridays back in the day.

BUCK: I thought you were talking about Office Space.

CLAY: They mocked it, but TGI Fridays is the place they were mocking. I don’t know if she officially worked at Fridays, but they used to have all the flare. And, yes, they made fun of that.

BUCK: That was Jennifer Aniston, right? Jennifer Aniston. She was also in the first Leprechaun movie, bringing it full circle here.

CLAY: I’m actually stunned she was in the first Leprechaun movie. By the way, Jennifer Aniston, amazing longevity for her career, when you think about the things that she’s done.

BUCK: I was wondering where you were going to take this. Yes, amazing career.

CLAY: You were nervous when I started off with the Jennifer Aniston sentence?

BUCK: (laughing) Clay and Jennifer may have had a relationship. Who knows?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: By the way, I wanted to finish with some humor. So we were hitting all of this, the demand that you wear the pride flag. You’re a bigot, according to ESPN. You’re a religious… You’re leaning into religious BS. And a lot of you have been pointing out that this is a famous scene in Seinfeld, which I said, “Hey, we’ve got to play this. This is a perfectly analogous situation.” I believe Kramer refused to wear a ribbon, if I’ve not forgotten.

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: Here is what it sounded like on Seinfeld. This is where we are now…

CLAY: This is where we are now, Buck! You gotta wear the ribbon or else. This is the crazy world that we have created.