It’s easy to call Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly a

hypocrite, mostly, of course, because he is. He oozes concern for the plight of

queer teenagers while doing his level best to make sure the world remains a

dangerous place in which to grow up gay. He pontificates on the sanctity of the

church while being sued by a former producer who claimed he whispered dirty

fantasies to her over the phone. And he shakes his fist in defense of truth,

justice, and the American way while repeating stories that are false.

But there’s one way in which O’Reilly shows a remarkable

consistency. Whether on his nightly show The

O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, his interviews on other people’s shows, or his

radio program, the ideology of the closet permeates nearly every word about

homosexuality that comes out of Bill O’Reilly’s mouth. He may describe himself

as a moderate because he doesn’t want to see gay people bashed, imprisoned, or

fired from our jobs, but the truth is, he just wants us to shut up, and doesn’t

hesitate to say so.

Below we’ll take a look at a collection of queer-relevant

O’Reilly clips, and find out just what he thinks is wrong with Gay America, how

he’d like to see it fixed – and what the queer world looks like through Bill

O’Reilly’s eyes.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE KIDS

It’s not clear what Bill O’Reilly, the man, thinks about gay

people – although if the sexual harassment suit filed by his former producer

Andrea Mackris is accurate, he’s very, very fond of lesbians. What is clear is

that Bill O’Reilly, the TV personality, seems to think we’re both radioactive

and contagious. After all, just sitting next to a same-sex couple holding hands

at a baseball game is apparently enough to send any normal parent into

paroxysms of fury at having to explain our existence to their innocent

children, who, had they not attended a baseball game on “Gay Day,” would have

grown up in a Leave it to Beaver world of heteronormativity and

traditional values, never knowing that homosexuals actually watch baseball.

That makes sense to O’Reilly, because in his world, if

you’re gay or lesbian, then everything you do that hints at, reveals, suggests,

or discloses your homosexuality is the exact equivalent of having sex in

public.

The San Diego

Padres vs. the Children

Of all the crimes of which lesbians and gay men have been

accused over the centuries, from consorting with Satan to betraying nuclear

secrets to the Soviets, one of the strangest is the charge O’Reilly makes on

this episode of Fox’s O’Reilly Factor: Watching a baseball game in the presence

of children.

With every loaded word and phrase in the lexicon of

homophobia, O’Reilly tries to cast the San Diego Padres and the gay and lesbian

community of San Diego

as debauchers of children and enemies of the family. He says “co-mingling” when

he means “sitting next to,” and refers ominously to “clusters” of gay people

filling the ball park – making the actual sunny images of sports fans out for

an afternoon of baseball that are playing in the background seem like some

clownish vision of hell straight out of a Fellini movie.

Not only was it Gay Day at Petco Park,

O’Reilly informed his viewers in lurid tones, but that same afternoon was hat

day for kids. Yes, every child who came to the game was, shockingly, given a

hat. This proved too much for O’Reilly

Factor guest Sandy Rios to bear. She’s not only a Fox News staffer, but president of family

values group Culture Campaign, and she found the whole thing to be “a huge

effort to propagate this to our children.”

Also appearing on the Factor,

Ron Deharte of San Diego Pride pointed out that children, families, and gay

people go to baseball games every day, and suggested the trauma is probably not

quite as profound as O’Reilly and Rios believe. Bill all but shrieked in

response, “The issue is, you're clustering a group that's based on sexuality,

okay? That's what it's based on. You know that. With children.”

Cutest Couple

Don’t misunderstand; it’s not just straight kids O’Reilly cares about. He’s

worried about gay kids, too. Really worried. Because the world he’s helping

create is a pretty dangerous place in which to grow up gay. As his guest in

this segment, Laura Berman, PhD, points out, gay teens often feel they have

nowhere to turn for support, and are more likely than straight teens to attempt

suicide and use drugs.

O’Reilly flashed up a photograph of two high school students

who had been voted that year’s “Cutest Couple” at an Illinois high school. It was a yearbook

photo like a thousand others, the couple’s cheeks barely touching, shy smiles

on their faces. Like a thousand others, that is, except for the fact that

Brandy Johnson and Lupe Silva are both girls.

Some people, such as Dr. Berman, seem to consider that a

positive sign, and believe that inclusion and visibility can go a long way to

improving the lives of lesbian and gay youth.

Bill has a different suggestion for making the lives of gay

kids safer, and surprise, surprise: It’s the closet. “Private behavior belongs

in private settings,” he raged, apparently having a different definition of “private

behavior” than the rest of the world. “I don't think it belongs in the high

school year book. There's no reason Brandy and Lupe had to declare themselves

anything other than friends… It's a matter of appropriateness.”

Since the girls are seniors in high school and they and most

of their classmates are 18 years old, it’s unlikely the existence of lesbians

was going to come as that much of a shock to anyone flipping through the

yearbook. And you have to wonder at just what point in their development

O’Reilly thinks that kids should be informed there are gay people in the world?

When they turn sixteen and learn to drive? At their high school graduation?

Never?

This Just In: Gay Teens Get Harassed

Bill took his “it’s for the kids” show on the road to

promote his newest book Kids are Americans, Too. “You know who’s getting bullied in school

the most now?” he asked his hosts, as if he were about to impart some

monumental news of a societal shift. “The gay kids and the kids from religious

and conservative homes.” This is news, that gay kids get harassed in school? No

wonder Bill doesn’t get it.

O’Reilly often claims he’s not anti-gay, largely because he

opposes the harassment of gay teenagers at school. (Which does raise the

question, is support for high school gay bashing so common on the right that

his opposition to it sets him apart?) But he has a pattern of only expressing

support for gay issues when they intersect with some other group he supports,

such as the children of conservative Christians, and that’s exactly what he

does here.

COMING OUT

It’s easy to say, if you’re a straight, white man with his

own TV show, that sexual orientation isn’t important, and there’s no reason for

people, famous or otherwise, to discuss it. But the closet doesn’t work that

way. Queer invisibility leads to a culture of alienated teens growing up

thinking no one else feels the way they do, unhappy marriages based on lies,

the fear of exposure to friends, family, and colleagues, and no actual relationships

with real gay people to counteract myths and propaganda. And the harm the

closet does to our civil rights is incalculable.

As Harvey Milk said nearly three decades ago, coming out is

one of the most powerful things GLBT people can do to promote our equality.

Time is proving him right: A 2006 study found that 70 percent of straight

adults know a GLBT person, and more than 80 percent of all lesbians and gay men

consider themselves to be out. That visibility has meant an increase in support

for GLBT civil rights and equality. People who have a gay family member or

friend are far more supportive of lesbian and gay equality in marriage and

adoption rights, and far less supportive of a Constitutional amendment banning

gay marriage.

With such a strong correlation between straight support of

our civil rights and knowing a gay friend or family member, O’Reilly’s

nostalgia for the closet looks less like the desire to return to a simpler,

more innocent age and more like what it is: Second class citizenship.

So what does Bill O’Reilly claim is so objectionable about

lesbians and gay men publicly discussing our sexual orientation? Most of the

time it has something to do with the children, although he flips back and forth

between protecting straight kids from knowing we exist and protecting queer

kids from getting bullied and bashed by their homophobic peers.

When it’s not about the kids, it’s about their parents, and

the agony they experience in having to explain to little Johnny why Rosie

O’Donnell married a girl.

And don’t even get him started on poor Dumbledore.

Bill O’Reilly Doesn’t Want to Hear About It

Bill O’Reilly has a lot in common with Rosie O’Donnell, as

he himself has admitted: “We’re both Irish. We’re both from Long

Island. And we both like women.”

Pay attention to that last part, because when Bill says it,

it’s just information. When Rosie says it? It’s having sex in public.

Back in 2002, O’Reilly appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a day or two after Rosie O’Donnell

came out in an interview with Diane Sawyer. Stewart wasn’t at his most feisty

that night, but he did interrupt Bill’s rant about how Rosie saying she’s a

lesbian amounts to a discussion of her sex life. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to

point out O’Reilly’s complete hypocrisy, but only to voice a mild objection

that if she hadn’t addressed it, it was going to be addressed for her. He was

pretty sure, he said, that Rosie would rather have kept it quiet forever.

We don’t know anything about your private life, O’Reilly

pointed out to Stewart – which is true, if you don’t count knowing that he’s

married to a woman, how he met his wife, what they did on their first date, and

all about the birth of their children (thereby proving they have sex) and what kind of

pets they have, all of which Stewart has discussed on his show many times.

O’Reilly also predicted that Ellen DeGeneres, having come

out as a lesbian, would “never succeed on television because a large part of America does

not want to hear about her sex life.” (Note to Bill: The Ellen DeGeneres Show is one of the most popular daytime

programs in TV history, averaging around 3 million viewers a day. The O’Reilly Factor? More like two

million and dropping every year.)

The Dumbledore Phenomenon

It’s bad enough when real-life gay people insist on coming

out. It’s even worse when an imaginary one does it. Especially when he’s a

wizard. And dead.

Almost nothing has ever sent O’Reilly through the roof like

J.K. Rowling’s response to a fan’s question about Dumbledore’s romantic past in

which she said Harry Potter’s mentor was gay. And while Dumbledore’s outing got

a lot of media coverage for someone who doesn’t exist, no one had more fun with

O'Reilly's reaction to it than Keith Olbermann.

Since it’s Bill O’Reilly, naturally this was all about the

children. And it’s eerily like a trip back in time to the McCarthy era, since

O’Reilly seems to think that J.K. Rowling (who is straight) wanted Dumbledore

to be gay (even though this fact about him is never mentioned in any of the

seven Harry Potter books) in order to

indoctrinate children not into homosexuality, but into something he clearly

finds even more repugnant: tolerance.

“That's what this Rowling thing is all about,” O’Reilly told

guest Dennis Miller, “Because she sells so many books, so many kids read it

that she comes out and says, ‘Oh, Dumbledore is gay, and that's great,’ and

this, it’s another in the indoctrination thing.”

When Miller demurred and said, “I'll be honest with you, I

don't think you can indoctrinate a kid into being gay,” O’Reilly interrupted.

“No, but into tolerance. He’s not going to be gay, but it’s

tolerance of it.”

If it makes Bill feel better, Rowling’s secret plan probably

won’t work. As Air America’s

Rachel Maddow points out about five minutes into the clip, “If the presence of

a secretly gay character was enough to brainwash people into liking the gays,

think about how different the U.S. Senate would be.”

MARRIAGE

Unlike many of his buddies at Fox, O’Reilly approves, in a

general way, of quiet, behind-closed-doors same-sex partnerships – emphasis on

the “quiet.” And you’ll be relieved to know that, while he does like a good

slippery slope argument, he (usually) rejects the idea that recognizing the

legality of gay marriage will lead inevitably to man/dog weddings.

Still, he’s adamantly and passionately opposed to same-sex

marriage and any legal recognition that goes much beyond hospital visitation

rights.

Michelangelo Signorile on the O’Reilly Factor

Out gay political commentator Michelangelo Signorile went on

Fox earlier this year to debate same-sex marriage with O’Reilly, and managed to

score some points while still getting pulled into a few of O’Reilly’s verbal

traps. It’s not that O’Reilly’s traps are especially clever. It’s more, as

Stephen Colbert once said, that people are always ready to criticize O’Reilly

for what he says, but “never give you credit for how loud you say it, or how

long.” At a

certain point, Signorile fell back to get his breath, letting Bill spew for a

while about polygamy, followed by a long dissertation on activist courts and

letting the people decide.

After Signorile got his second wind, he reminded O’Reilly

that in 1969, 90 percent of people were opposed to interracial marriage. “You

don't bring a civil rights issue to the ballot,” he said sternly.

Bill fell back on the polygamy rant, and Signorile rolled

his eyes. “It's a desperation move. They go to polygamy, then bestiality.

Someone's gonna want to marry their dog.”

“Nah,” answered Bill. “Bestiality's a public health thing.”

Those Darn Scandinavians

Slippery slope polygamy is apparently the only thing Bill’s

got going for him in his argument against gay marriage. Well, that and the

stuff that isn't true.

“Correct me if I’m wrong” about gay marriage, he tells his

guests, William N. Eskridge Jr. and Darren R. Spedale, authors of Gay

Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We've Learned from the Evidence.

And Professor Eskridge does. In response to O’Reilly’s

cataloguing of the harm done to marriage and the family in Scandinavia

since same-sex unions received legal recognition, he said, “No. I think that's

not true. I think exactly we saw the opposite. And that's why these statistics

are so interesting. In Denmark,

Norway, and Sweden, in each

of those countries, after they passed their gay marriage type laws, their

registered partnership laws, the rates of heterosexual marriage went up per

capita. The rates of heterosexual divorce went down.”

Bill didn’t like that too much, so he ignored it, repeating

his version of the professors’ research to a guest just a few minutes later on

the same show.

This particular MediaMatters.org clip contains segments from

a number of different shows, including some audio from O’Reilly’s call-in radio

show where he slides right down that slippery slope to man/duck marriage when a

caller gets too truthy on him. The clip concludes with another TV guest giving

Bill a dose of reality on same-sex parenting.

Of course, none of that really matters, because the next

thing you know, someone’s gonna be marrying their dog. Or Flipper.

POLITICS

It’s the Math, Stupid

There are websites devoted solely to debunking, correcting,

and ranting about O’Reilly’s numerous, flagrant, and unapologetic excesses,

lies, and exaggerations. MediaMatters.org, started by out gay ex-conservative

David Brock to monitor the media for accuracy, devotes a big hunk of its

bandwidth to pointing out each and every time O’Reilly gets it wrong. And,

unsurprisingly, O’Reilly is frequently the winner of Keith Olbermann’s nightly

“Worst Person in the World” award – and sometimes the runner-up, too.

One of Bill’s doubleheader “Worst Person” wins was on August

16, 2007, when he took second place for calling a Daily Kos user an anti-Semite

for quoting someone else’s anti-Semitic remarks in order to disagree with him.

Too bad for Bill the guy turned out to be a lawyer. O’Reilly won the crown,

though, for telling his audience that most Americans won’t vote for you if you

get endorsed by a gay organization.

Not so, Olbermann said. In the poll O’Reilly cited, 30

percent of respondents said they’d be less likely to vote for a candidate

endorsed by a GLBT organization, 10 percent said they’d be more likely,

and a whopping 58 percent didn’t care either way. “Is it the truth that you

hate, Bill? Or just the math?” finished Olbermann.

Gay Cannibals: Now that's a Slippery Slope

It’s much easier to keep gay people invisible when our

history is invisible, too. Which might explain why O’Reilly and right wing

pundit Michelle Malkin were lamenting a proposed California law that would require state

approved textbooks to include GLBT historical figures and events when she

joined him on his show one night in May of 2006.

What do school textbooks have to do with gay cannibals?

Well, nothing, really. But in Malkin and O’Reilly’s world, the proposed law

meant that teachers would be legally prevented from saying “bad things about

Jeffery Dahmer” because in addition to being a cannibal and a serial killer, he

was gay.

The law says nothing of the sort, of course; even Malkin’s

own words make that clear (italics ours): “I looked at this bill over very

closely, and it is a very radical, very extreme, dangerous bill. It says that

no teacher can even say anything that would, quote unquote, ‘reflect adversely’

on anyone, a historical figure, whatever, based on their sexual orientation.”

Even if that were accurate,

teachers would still be free to point out that cannibalism is bad, as long as

they didn’t say they it was only bad because the cannibal in question was gay.

But of course, that’s not what the law proposed at all. As MediaMatters.org

points out, the law simply added GLBT people to the list of those who were

traditionally under-represented in history texts, such as women and ethnic

minorities.

And you know how O’Reilly

feels about tradition.

CULTAH

One of O’Reilly’s favorite catch phrases is “culture war.”

He even used it in the title of his 2006 book Culture Warrior. Of

course, when he says “culture” he’s not referring to the opera or knowing which

fork to use for the salad. He’s talking – albeit in code – about the gays and

our fellow travelers, the secular humanists.

Because if this is a war, there must be an enemy. And guess

what? That’s us, too.

The Gay War on Christmas

It’s that time of year again, but if Bill O’Reilly has his

way, we won’t be saying “Happy Holidays” much longer. That’s because he’s

firmly convinced that fully 95 percent of all Americans want to say “Merry

Christmas,” and the other five should just suck it up and say it, too.

The people responsible for this aren’t just the gays, but

the entire army (but remember, no more than five percent of the population) of

secular humanists who want to remove all vestiges of religion from public life.

But why are they so intent on getting “Christianity and spirituality and

Judaism out of the public square”? It’s

all about gay marriage, of course. Well, that and the legalization of drugs and

euthanasia.

It’s a little unclear from this clip whether the destruction

of all religion will lead to gay marriage or the recognition of gay marriage

will itself destroy religion. Sometimes the finer details get lost when you’re

sliding down the slippery slope. But the collapse of societal norms is firmly

linked to increasing tolerance of homosexuality, proving that every time

someone says “Happy Holidays,” a lesbian or gay man comes out of the closet.

Or is that the other way round?

The Gay War on Straights

This time the warriors have scarier weapons than a cheerful

“Happy Holidays.” This time, they have guns.

Imaginary guns, to be sure, which is fine, because the

warriors are imaginary, too. Not wizards this time, but gangs of lesbian thugs

roaming the streets of America

committing acts of violence on straight men. There are, he assured his viewers,

as many as 150 such gangs in the Washington,

DC, area alone.

O’Reilly’s guest expert on lesbian gangs eventually admitted

he was wrong and even apologized, but the fact that O’Reilly could have

believed the story for one minute is the inevitable consequence of that closet

of queer silence he advocates so passionately. If you don’t know any real gay

people, it’s easy to imagine them as pink-pistol-packing predatory creatures of

the night, instead of your cousin from New

Jersey or the middle-aged woman who does your taxes.

BILL O’REILLY’S WORLD

It’s sometimes tempting to give Bill O’Reilly the benefit of

the doubt on queer issues. He

professes no personal animosity towards GLBT people, and even voices lukewarm

support for gay adoption rights – or at least believes that, while a straight

adoptive family is preferred, being raised by queers is better than the foster

care system. He insists he doesn’t hate or even dislike us. Bill’s problem, it

seems, is not with our existence, but our visibility.

But visibility is irreversible. While he and others on the

right may deplore them, gay/straight alliances are springing up in schools

across the country. Queer teens can learn they’re not alone just by watching

O’Reilly rant about Brandy and Lupe on Fox. There are hundreds of openly gay

elected officials, newscasters, rock stars, movie directors, and daytime talk

show hosts, not to mention imaginary dead gay wizards.

If Bill O’Reilly really wants homosexuality to fade into the

background, he should consider another approach. He’s written four New York

Times best-selling books, has a popular nightly show on the top-rated news

channel on cable, as well as a radio program heard on over 400 stations and a

syndicated column running in over 300 newspapers.

So here’s a suggestion: What if, instead of telling gay

teens to stay in the closet for their own protection, he told the hundreds of

thousands of parents in his audience to stop raising their kids to believe

homosexuality is wrong? Or did a segment on anti-gay violence that spent more

time asking how to stop it from happening than on what gay people could do to

avoid it? Wouldn’t that make the world a fairer, safer place for queer kids and

the adults they become?