Christian Defense Coalition Picketing ESPN Today
Monday, February 11th, 2008If you're new here, and you're into sports and/or the Christian faith, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Perhaps you’ve seen the videos of ESPN’s Chris Berman that have been all over the internet for the past week? They all seem to be about 5-7 years old, and feature Berman off camera (or so he thought) using language that your pastor would not use from the pulpit.
I don’t want you to get in trouble searching for them all over the scary internets, so here they are if you’re interested. Just so you know, clips 1,3, and 4 contain cussing and clip 4 contains Chris taking God’s name in vain a few times (7, actually). If you’d rather not hear any of that, skip over the links.
- 1 - In which Berman drops 11 F-Bombs in 54 seconds.
- 2 - In which Berman puts on a veritable clinic on how to sexually harass a female employee. (hey, no cussing!)
- 3 - In which Berman describes how to smuggle over-the-counter Codeine into the country from Canada.
- 4 - In which Berman gets a bit angry at the production crew.
First Dana Jacobson and now this. Apparently, the Christian Defense Coalition has had enough.
“The Christian Defense Coalition will be calling on ESPN to take three positive steps toward building a culture of religious tolerance in their workplace:
*Discipline or terminate any employee that uses religiously intolerant and hateful language such as “Goddamn” or the negative use of “Jesus Christ” in the workplace.
*Sponsor a workplace seminar and dialogue on religious tolerance and discrimination in the workplace. ESPN has held similar seminars on race and gender but never on religion.
*Host a discussion on one of their programs featuring the topic of the offensive use of “Goddamn” and “Jesus Christ” within the sports world.
It is the goal of the Christian Defense Coalition to help ESPN realize the negative use of “Jesus Christ” and “Goddamn” in the workplace is as offense and hateful as using the term “nigger” in the workplace.
The Coalition will be demonstrating today at high noon in front of ESPN (across the street from the McDonald’s) in hopes that “…ESPN will take a positive first step toward ending workplace religious intolerance by implementing our three recommendations. ”
These videos were obviously recorded and saved without anyone knowing about it. Suddenly they are being put on the internet 7 years later, probably because whoever published them has since moved on from ESPN.
What do you think? Does Berman, at the very least, owe folks an apology for the language he used? Should ESPN take action against him? Would you be ok with comments you made 7 years ago in private showing up on YouTube? Is picketing ESPN a good idea?
It’s true that Berman wasn’t on the air when he said all this, but he was at work, and as such, ESPN should have the right to take action against him if they wanted to. Does anyone know what the statute of limitations are on cussing?
Tags: Chris Berman, cussing, ESPN
I was surprised earlier this afternoon to see that ESPN.com was actually running the Dana Jacobson story on their front page links (although i see that now, 8 hours later, it is nowhere to be found). While the story had received a good bit of attention on the sports blog circuit, it’s the type of thing that usually gets swept under the rug over at the four letter.
