Bill O'Reilly
"Take me out to the ballgame, take me out to the crowd…"
Unless that crowd is full of queers. Then you'd best keep the kiddies at home.
That's what Bill O'Reilly thinks about the July 8 gay pride night at a San Diego Padres game that coincided with "free hat day" for kids. On the July 11 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, he called it "unbelievable," "inappropriately timed" and "insane."
According to a 2004 story in Rolling Stone, "O'Reilly loves any story that smacks of child mistreatment. There's easy emotion in it, and what O'Reilly is always looking for is emotion, something to jolt his viewers, to stir them to an indignation, disbelief or contempt equal to his own."
And stir he did. "Thousands of gay adults showed up and commingled with straight families," O'Reilly lamented. "It is not unreasonable for parents to object to any public sexual displays at family-friendly events. Baseball is the national pastime, a sport, not a social experiment."
He peppered the broadcast with clips of these alleged "public sexual displays." And sure enough, there were gays and lesbians engaged in lurid acts of, well, handholding, closed mouth kissing, arms around each-othering, and then there was this one guy in the stands dancing in kind of a fruity way but he was wearing a plaid shirt so there's really no telling.
So why is this even a story, let alone one for O'Reilly to devote a big chunk of his TV show to? Because the idea of gays and kids still makes a lot of people feel queasy. And O'Reilly's not afraid to fan the flames of fear for ratings.
Granted, he gets someone else to do his dirty work for him, namely Sandy Rios, president of the Culture Campaign, a group who believes that "No Child Left Behind" is the slogan of the "gay agenda." She tells O'Reilly, "There is a huge effort to propagate this to our children. And all we have to do is look to Massachusetts and California, just two states to mention, to see how far the radical homosexual agenda would go to radicalize our children."
Later in the program she says that "the radical gay agenda is in the business of removing parental rights and indoctrinating children. I am not overstating this."
Except she is. And even O'Reilly knows it. "I think you're off-base on this," he tells her.
But the damage has already been done. Millions of people have had the bullshit idea "gays are dangerous to kids" pumped into their brains once again on national television.
On the July 12 edition of MSNBC's "Countdown," host Keith Olbermann wasted no time and named O'Reilly his nightly "Worst Person in the World" for his Padres game segment.
In 2004 Rolling Stone reported that O'Reilly is for "same-sex adoptions and civil unions (as long as he doesn't have to watch gay-pride parades, which he says are among 'the most offensive spectacles of all')…"
Gosh, with friends like this, who needs enemies?
