It is pretty entertaining to see the Religious Right ripping Bill O'Reilly for his arrogance and ignorance, especially since they only seem to have discovered it once he upset them.
Case in point, Bill Keller has issued a $10,000 challenge to O'Reilly to debate him.
To hear Mat Staver and Matt Barber describe it, The Awakening Conference is just about the most important thing ever.
Speaking of Staver, he received the Faith Community Leader of the Year Award at the Weyrich Awards Dinner, which is a good reminder that radical Religious Right anti-gay voices are regularly honored within the movement.
Finally, and on a related note, Steve Deace takes on "laughabe gay marriage cliches" like "homosexuality is in nature so it’s natural" by declaring "there’s also the licking of one’s own genitals, the flinging of one’s own feces, and the eating of live prey and then vomiting it back up to feed your offspring in nature, too."
Bryan Fischer is furious with Bill O'Reilly over his recent statement that opponents of marriage equality do nothing but "thump the Bible" as Fischer ripped into him on his radio program yesterday, calling O'Reilly "blindly ignorant" of all the non-Scriptural arguments opponents of gay marriage have made.
Fischer admitted that anti-gay activists have indeed thumped their Bibles and have done so because it contains the revealed word of God, but they have made other arguments as well, but O'Reilly - who "a lot of the times just comes across as a pompous, arrogant windbag" - has just been "completely oblivious to this." Fischer was outraged by this "insult, this ridicule, this mockery of ordinary Americans who do believe in the Bible as the revealed word of God."
"The implication," Fischer declared, "is [that] we're a bunch of neanderthal, redneck, hillbilly Bible-bangers. That is essentially what he is saying were are ... He's insulting us to our face":
Conservative talk show host Steve Deace is not happy with Bill O’Reilly’s seeming reversal on marriage equality, telling Religious Right activist Bob Vander Plaats that O’Reilly is “betraying” his own viewers and is essentially a “charlatan” and a “fraud.”
While discussing the Supreme Court’s handling of the marriage cases with Vander Plaats, who warned that the court could “set off a constitutional crisis,” Deace said that O’Reilly is a traitor to his conservative base: “you stab them in the back, throw them under the bus and use the enemy’s own language against them. To me that’s a hanging offense; that is a hanging offense.”
Vander Plaats: If you usurp the will of the people—we saw it in Iowa, you usurp the will of the people, three justices get removed, there’s a credibility gap with the three justices that continue to serve— if you usurp the vote of the people of California you will set off a constitutional crisis against these United States and it should be a constitutional crisis. People like you and me and others, we’d help do our part to set off a constitutional crisis if that is in fact what they came back with.
Deace: I’ve got a bee in my bonnet big time and it’s Bill O’Reilly at Fox News. I don’t like charlatans, I don’t like frauds; give me Rachel Maddow, at least she’s honest. But when you are trying to profit off of the very people you are betraying and you have tried to condescend them and patronize them for years and then at the moment they probably need you to return the favor of all the money they made you over the last fifteen years the most, you stab them in the back, throw them under the bus and use the enemy’s own language against them. To me that’s a hanging offense; that is a hanging offense.
Deace said there are no good arguments for same-sex marriage, and gay rights activists are just throwing “a hissy-fit.” He even said it is pointless to note that homosexuality is found in other species besides humans since “there’s also the licking of one’s own genitals, the flinging of one’s own feces and the eating of live prey and then puking it up to feed your offspring in nature too.”
With this issue there are no good arguments for it because the argument essentially boils down to, ‘because I want it.’ It’s essentially a tantrum; it’s policy by desire. ‘Because I want it.’ It’s a child throwing a hissy-fit, tantrum in Wal-Mart because mom bought me the regular sized M&Ms and not the king-sized that I demanded. As Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation pointed out on CNN this week that just drove the reporter into a meltdown, ‘no one is in jail for having consensual homosexual sex with another adult, what you’re trying to do is impose your narrow definition of what this means and therefore what it means for free speech and religious liberty on everybody else.’ So they throw out all these clichés and they are so easy to debunk. One of my favorites is, ‘well there’s homosexuality in nature.’ There’s also the licking of one’s own genitals, the flinging of one’s own feces and the eating of live prey and then puking it up to feed your offspring in nature too.
Anyone who has watched the footage of Bill O’Reilly’s infamous meltdown on the set of Inside Edition knows that the Fox News personality has a hot temper. But you would expect the Fox News personality, who has sent his producers to literally stalk people like Huffington Post reporter Amanda Terkel, to have a relatively thick skin and be able to keep his composure in public. Not so, it turns out.
Bill O’Reilly, reportedly walking out of a Newt Gingrich fundraiser held last night in DC (see update below), is asked by Wisconsin community organizer Branden Lane if he attended the fundraiser. O’Reilly ignores him and then, with no prompting, strikes Lane with his umbrella. He then says, “Hey, sorry about that.” O’Reilly, with Lane following at a distance, then walks with his now-broken umbrella over to a Secret Service officer outside the White House. Incredibly, you can hear O’Reilly say that he wants to press charges against the man he just struck.
It’s a good thing for Lane that he caught O’Reilly’s temper tantrum on tape, otherwise he could have ended up in prison, falsely accused of assault. As for O’Reilly, it’s revealing that he not only struck Lane – on tape no less – but then sought to press false charges. Will there be consequences?
UPDATE: TPM reports that O'Reilly was staying at the same hotel as the Gingrich fundraiser but did not attend.
Right-wing pundits and political leaders committed to the destruction of the Obama presidency have been openly fomenting racial resentment or tolerating those who do. In one breath, they accuse President Obama of being racist and in the next they and their media allies howl with indignation if their own racial rhetoric is challenged.
Shortly after anti-government terrorist Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, President Bill Clinton urged Americans to challenge those who use powerful political and media platforms to promote the kind of inflammatory falsehoods that poison public discourse, make civil conversation impossible, and can ultimately lead to violence. The reaction from right-wing leaders of the day was sadly predictable and by now familiar: they claimed that Clinton was seeking to "silence" voices of dissent, even though his speech affirmed that the First Amendment protects both the purveyors of irresponsible speech and those who challenge him.
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