Local Massachusetts officials resign after blasting kneeling NFL players on Facebook
Two Massachusetts public officials have resigned in the wake of public outcry over comments they made on social media criticizing NFL players who knelt Sunday during the national anthem. “Turds, your d****** isn’t paid to think about politics…dance monkey dance,” Brockton Parks and Recreation Commissioner Stephen Pina commented on a Boston25 story on Facebook about New England Patriots players kneeling, The Brockton Enterprise reports. MassLive reports that Pina resigned after Brockton Mayor Bill Carpenter asked him to step down. Pina told the Enterprise he did not intend for his words to be racist and said he was drafting an apology that he planned to post online. “It was not meant to be a racist comment, and if it was taken as such that’s regrettable,” Pina told the newspaper. “I want to set the record straight.”Pina told the Enterprise that, as a veteran who respects the American flag, he thinks players should stand for the national anthem. According to the newspaper, the Brockton resident admitted that he “may have been caught up in” the outrage surrounding the debate that has dominated social media in recent days. The Cape Cod Times reports that Joseph Glynn, a member of the Yarmouth Housing Authority, began posting on Facebook Sunday to express his anger at the NFL players who remained kneeling during the anthem and team owners who he believes didn’t condemn the players’ actions. Glynn has since deleted a post that allegedly used epithets about Jews, African Americans, and gays, according to the newspaper.He told the newspaper he didn’t direct the alleged racial slurs or explicit language at anyone. “I’m saying people who have used those words and have been offended by them, they should understand where I’m coming from, that I was offended,” he told the Times. In a Facebook post, Glynn said his resignation “has to do with the lack of understanding by the greater community of the offensive nature of comments by many in the community and my personal feelings of a overall jaded pessimism towards the tolerance and respect to those feelings.”
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