A high-ranking CrossFit employee told BuzzFeed News that he has been placed on an unpaid leave of absence after tweeting his support for a CrossFit gym’s cancellation of a Pride event, citing his belief that celebrating LGBTQ pride is a “sin.”
Russell Berger, the mega-successful fitness company’s chief knowledge officer and often its de facto spokesperson, said he does not know how long his leave of absence will last. But his work — including his writing for “The Russells,” a blog about scientific misconduct that he maintains with colleague Russell Greene — has been put on hold at least temporarily, he told BuzzFeed News.Berger got into hot water on Wednesday afternoon, when he tweeted about a CrossFit gym in Indianapolis where owners canceled a workout in honor of Pride Month. Many of the coaches and employees quit in protest, raising the possibility that the gym could shut down, according to WTTV TV in Indianapolis.”As someone who personally believes celebrating ‘pride’ is a sin, I’d like to personally encourage #CrossFitInfiltrate for standing by their convictions and refusing to host an @indypride workout,” Berger wrote. “The intolerance of the LGBTQ ideology toward any alternative views is mind-blowing.”
He added, “The tactics of some in the LGBTQ movement toward dissent is an existential threat to freedom of expression.” In response to a Twitter user who pushed back, he wrote, “Thankfully I work for a company that tolerates disagreement. I have homosexual coworkers who I love and respect, and as far as I am aware, they aren’t demanding I be punished for my views.”
He then deleted those tweets and others after people in the CrossFit community and elsewhere condemned his remarks and called for him to be fired.
Shortly before Berger was placed on leave, CrossFit founder and CEO Greg Glassman told BuzzFeed News that he did not stand by Berger’s views, which he called “appalling.” CrossFit’s official Twitter account also quoted him as saying, “I am crazy proud of the gay community in CrossFit.”
“He needs to take a big dose of ‘shut the fuck up’ and hide out for awhile. It’s sad,” Glassman said in an interview. “We do so much good work with such pure hearts — to have some zealot in his off-time do something this stupid, we’re all upset. The whole company is upset. This changes his standing with us. What that looks like, I don’t know. It’s so unfortunate.”Berger, who lives in Huntsville, Alabama, is a CrossFit trainer who opened up an early CrossFit affiliate. He is also an Orthodox Christian and a pastor at a local church, he told BuzzFeed News.His anger over the Indianapolis situation arose after reading news reports about it. “I have no qualms with the gym owner expressing his personal convictions, I have no qualms with customers and coaches leaving because they have different convictions,” he said. “But I did have qualms with the massive response from people who had no direct business relationship with the affiliate, but just engaged in social media-organized public destruction of his business’ reputation and forced him to shut his doors. I think that’s an expression of pure intolerance, not being able to disagree with someone and engage in meaningful discourse.”Berger says he often tweets about CrossFit as an employee and public representative of that company, as well as religious issues “as a social media user and the pastor of a church.” So his tweets aren’t “nothing I haven’t said before on social media.”But the two subjects don’t usually come together as they did in this case. “It became way too difficult to discern between me making statements of personal opinion, and me speaking as a voice for CrossFit,” he said.He said that he should have anticipated that his comments would be interpreted as him speaking on behalf of CrossFit. “I should have realized that, and I didn’t until it was too late,” he said. “I do regret it.”But, he added, he stands by his original sentiment: “My actual point I was making, I still affirm it.”
Original source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/crossfit-russell-berger-lgbtq-pride-sin.
