Now Bill O'Reilly has chimed in.
In the past, O'Reilly has called religious extremists, like "ex-gay" homosexual Stephen Bennett, on their religious extremism. So he was 1 for 1.
Evidently Mr. O'Reilly was sounding far too reasonable to his ideologue boss at Fox News, Roger Ailes, a former media consultant to Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. So, not to alienate the gay-haters in his audience, O'Reilly decided to call the ACLU a terrorist organization for defending the right of students at Boyd County High School to form a gay-straight alliance:
"I would have turned them down. Because I say once you open the door to a club based on sexuality, then you got to have the S&M club, the bigamy club, you know any club." (emphasis added)
Too bad Mr. O'Reilly isn't the one picking and choosing which clubs can and cannot meet afterhours in public schools. What O'Reilly is doing here is called "viewpoint discrimination," a repugnant concept whereby a public entity, in this case a public school, decides what expression and speech it likes and what expression and speech it doesn't like, creating preferences for one over the other. Public schools used to do this before the Equal Access Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Reagan in 1984. Schools used to ban religious groups from meeting afterhours, but these same schools would allow other groups. After Equal Access went into effect, however, *all* groups, religious and secular, could meet and could not be discriminated against by the public school based on content. The only choice a school has in a situation where they dislike the content of a club is to ban *all* clubs.
So, back to Mr. O'Reilly:
"I call them a fascist organization. Because what they're doing is using terror to further their agenda."
Hmmm...the ACLU is a fascist terrorist organization for defending the rights of a small group of people who are having their right to gather crushed by a school which doesn't like what the small group stands for? That's not terrorism, Mr. O'Reilly, that's called defending the Constitution and taking advantage of your resources to fight back.
Alas, Mr. O'Reilly obviously despises the principle of Equal Access. Instead of taking out his anger on the law and advocating for the repeal of the law, however, he decides to attack the ACLU for using the law to the benefit of the students who wish to form the gay-straight alliance.
Mr. O'Reilly really needs to stop throwing temper tantrums and arguing on the level of a two year-old. He is now 1 for 2.
