NFL Player Jokes About Tim Tebow's Virginity on Twitter
Philadelphia Eagles guard Evan Mathis garnered media attention this week after joking about Tim Tebow's virginity in a Twitter post.
On Sunday, Mathis posted to his Twitter account the image of a sign that said, "Don't die a virgin terrorists are up there waiting for you." He tweeted the image along with a personal message to the Christian quarterback, which said, "@Tim Tebow, thinking about you big guy."
Mathis, who played college football at The University of Alabama, also grabbed headlines last week when he posted a picture to Instagram of himself either urinating or pretending to urinate on a sign outside of an Internal Revenue Service building . As a caption to the image, which he posted several days after the IRS admitted to targeting conservative groups, Mathis wrote: "Audit this."
While many Twitter users have said how much they enjoy the athlete's humor, some have expressed their disdain for his joking about Tebow's virginity.
"If making fun of people was cool........but it's not," Twitter user Natasha Guindon posted in response to Mathis' message to the quarterback.
Tebow, who is currently an NFL free agent, told reporters as a college athlete in 2009 that he is waiting until marriage to have sex. Since that time, his virginity has been a topic of discussion in the media and other companies have even tried to use it for promotional purposes.
During an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box" last October, co-anchor Joe Kernen asked Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets and Tebow's then-boss, whether the quarterback was a virgin. Johnson replied, "I don't really go into that."
When Tebow made his move from the Denver Broncos to the Jets early last year, Virgin Atlantic Airways offered him free flights for as long as he remained a virgin.
Also around that time a controversial website, AshleyMadison.com, offered a $1 million reward to the woman who could prove that she had been sexually intimate with Tebow. "Tebow has been using his infamy from this year's football season to get some ladies in the sack," a press release from the website, which is designed to help married people have affairs, claimed.
"I think there are many people that hold Tim's view on purity and on abstinence, the difference is we're not being asked that with a public platform," Esther Fleece, a former spokesperson for Focus on the Family, told The Christian Post at the time of the Ashley Madison offer. "I think it takes an even stronger person to be able to handle the criticism and mocking when you're in the spotlight like Tim is."
