For what’s seemed like an eternity, Bill O’Reilly has amassed a fortune by anointing himself a “culture warrior” while waging what he’s called “the culture wars” — an ongoing battle between white Christian conservatives, commanded by narcissist-in-chief O’Reilly, against everyone else. As part of this so-called war, O’Reilly has routinely lashed out at one of his favorite villains: anyone who rightly agrees that America is a nation of secular laws, and he’d lump all of these people into the broad category of “secular progressives.”

Then, last week, like one of those cinematic moments when an entire battlefield drops into slow-motion and the sound becomes low, eery and muffled, the culture war stopped and the tide appeared to turn. On the March 26 edition of his show, O’Reilly seemed to be evolving on same-sex marriage when he admitted that marriage equality activists have a more “compelling argument” than conservative opponents who “thump the Bible.” Shocker! He went on to endorse the notion that individual states should be tasked with legalizing same-sex marriage — a de facto confession that he’d support it if it were to happen at the state level.

Now, let’s be clear about what’s at stake with regards to the Defense of Marriage Act. The federal government isn’t determining whether same-sex marriage is legal or illegal, nor is it telling the states what to do about marriages that take place within each state. Rather, by declaring DOMA unconstitutional in the Supreme Court or passing a repeal in Congress, the federal government would merely recognize same-sex marriages for the purposes of tax filing status, government employee benefits and interstate recognition of marriages. As of right now, with DOMA as the (awful) law of the land, it doesn’t. Each state will continue to individually determine whether same-sex marriage is accepted as legitimate, but as long as DOMA is in place, the federal government doesn’t acknowledge those marriages at the federal level for the previously stated purposes.

Okay, so back to O’Reilly. As soon as he said “thump the Bible” to Megyn Kelly last week, you could almost hear the booming sound of a gazillion white septuagenarians across the nation angrily shouting “FA**OT!” and hurling bottles of Gold Bond Medicated Powder at their tiny black and white televisions (for some reason I imagine O’Reilly viewers not owning color TV sets). The fallout was amazing to behold. Rush Limbaugh, whose respect for the sanctity of marriage is evident in his four marriages and three divorces, accused O’Reilly of “marginalizing” his audience. The feud between these leviathans of the conservative entertainment complex was like watching Godzilla fight Mecha-Godzilla — though O’Reilly’s and Limbaugh’s heads are slightly larger. Elsewhere, a mid-level conservative radio host said that O’Reilly should be “hanged” for his remarks. Yesterday, Christian evangelist Bryan Fischer called O’Reilly a “pompous arrogant windbag” for the now infamous “thump the Bible” line.

Everything reached a dramatic climax the other night — that cinematic slow-motion battle scene I mentioned earlier — when Bill O’Reilly spoke the following words:

“If you’re going to stand up for heterosexual marriage, and exclude gay marriage, if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to do it outside the Bible. You can’t cite the Bible because you’ll lose if you do. [...] We’re talking a policy deal here. Don’t you understand the difference between private beliefs and public policy?”

At first glance, he didn’t appear to outright support same-sex marriage but, instead, he outlined a what he believed to be an effective strategy against it. However, he obviously undercut one of the chief tenets of far-right conservatism: the mandatory foisting of Christianity onto public policy. He defined what can only be considered a “wall of separation” between public policy and private beliefs. In other words: secularism. Private beliefs are ineffective and therefore unwelcome in debates about public policy. As defined by Merriam-Webster:

1a : of or relating to the worldly or temporal
b : not overtly or specifically religious
c : not ecclesiastical or clerical
2: not bound by monastic vows or rules; specifically : of, relating to, or forming clergy not belonging to a religious order or congregation

I can’t tell you how profoundly groundbreaking this was. Bill O’Reilly — the Culture Warrior — rejected the use of religious dogma in debating the laws and policies of the United States. This is precisely what the framers had in mind when they created the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and flatly rejected the notion of Christianity informing public policy as it had in England for too many years. They recognized that if religion were capable of interfering with government, so too could government interfere with religious liberty. The door could swing both ways and undermine both liberty and, yes, the secular nation they were attempting to forge.

And then, last night, O’Reilly continued to milk the controversy by delivering yet another of his “talking points memo” monologues about the fracas. Oddly, he began by attacking “secular progressives,” a term which, at this point in the O’Reilly universe, has been rendered meaningless since he now supports secularism, and continued to make his earlier point about not using religion to define a public policy argument — in other words, he criticized secularism while also making a solid case in favor of it. This time he pandered to conservatives by praising the anti-choice movement’s alleged abandonment of religious arguments against abortion. (Weird, since they haven’t.) He went on to repeat his view that the states, not the federal government, ought to determine marital legitimacy. He also said that the federal government has no constitutional right to be involved. I’m not sure he meant to do it, but O’Reilly basically implied that DOMA, which defines marriage at the federal level, is unconstitutional. So… whoops.

Whatever ends up happening with O’Reilly and his apparent enlightenment on secular policy-making, it’s critical that those of us on the secular side of the debate keep handy his quote about private beliefs versus public policy. One of the most effective debate maneuvers is to use the other side’s own people and sources against them, and this is O’Reilly quote is a big one. He’s rendered irrelevant any mention of the Bible in the policy debate. Beyond effective debating, O’Reilly has unwittingly stumbled onto one of those Gestalt moments when the bigger picture has been revealed to someone who’s otherwise closed-minded, simplistic and exclusionary. This is all it takes to begin a gradual awakening to a more tolerant, rational, reasonable and, in so many cases, a more liberal worldview. It remains to be seen whether O’Reilly will be the next conservative in line to be hectored out of the movement and end up slowly lurching toward the center-left like we’ve seen with players such as Charles Johnson, David Frum and Joe Scarborough (see gun control). But stranger things have happened.

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“Tomato Can” (Sports Idiom): A fighter with poor or diminished skills (at least when compared with the opponent they are placed against) who may be considered an easy opponent to defeat, or a “guaranteed win.” Fights with “tomato cans” can be arranged to inflate the win total of a professional fighter. — Wikipedia

So last night Dennis Kucinich made his debut as a Fox News contributor. The former Ohio congressman, perennial presidential candidate and liberal stalwart joined Fox earlier this week, but it was on yesterday’s O’Reilly Factor that he had his official coming out party. As you can imagine, Kucinich received a very cordial welcome from O’Reilly, who couldn’t resist taking the opportunity right off the bat to make the claim that Kucinich’s very presence on-air disproved Fox News’s critics, who insist that the network is nothing but a propaganda machine for the right. “Wow, what a conversion!” O’Reilly said to Kucinich. “Congressman, how did that happen? You know all the people on Fox News are far-right crazy people!”

Uh-huh. Because casting an ineffectual laughingstock like Kucinich as one of its maybe three token liberals, all of whom are ineffectual laughingstocks of one stripe or another, really proves that Fox News is committed to presenting a progressive viewpoint that’s as bold, slickly packaged and indomitable as the traditional conservative viewpoint that’s made it famous. Let’s do a head count: You’ve got Pat Cadell, who’s basically a Republican these days and who long since stopped being taken seriously by anyone; Bob Beckel, a slovenly buffoon who comes off as an especially hapless dupe in the face of Eric Bolling’s smarmy, bullying used car salesman every night on The Five; and now Dennis Kucinich, who couldn’t live up to the modern conservative preconception of progressives as pencil-necked, tree-hugging hippie-dippy twerps just crying out to be given a George McFly-style atomic wedgie and stuffed in a locker somewhere if he made an actual effort. All Kucinich is missing is a bow tie and a briefcase, or, personality-wise, a tie-dyed headband.

An interesting thing to keep in mind, though, when considering these three Fox regulars isn’t simply that each of them has absolutely zero chance of coming out on top of any head-on confrontation with boisterous right-wing “tough guys” like Hannity, Gutfeld or even O’Reilly, it’s that two of them actually allow Fox to continue pushing to its audience of resentful, white Middle-Americans the myth that nobody likes Barack Obama; both Cadell and Kucinich have regularly been critical of Obama, Kucinich largely from the far-left, which proves that in Fox’s eyes, the enemy of my sworn enemy is my friend, regardless of his or her political beliefs.

The fact remains that you’re never going to regularly see someone from the left or even center-left on Fox News — the latter of which could be considered much more dangerous since he or she would be harder to pigeonhole and dismiss outright as the enemy — with the smarts and the ferocity to make a real stand against the network’s typical onslaught of horseshit. Regardless of network affiliation, there’s never going to be anyone like a Rachel Maddow, or a Lawrence O’Donnell, or a Frank Rich defending President Obama or progressive principles on Fox News. All you’re ever going to get are tomato cans because that’s how Fox needs to present its political enemy. The network is all about providing good news from the front for desperate, angry conservatives, and confirming their worst suspicions about what liberals look, talk and act like.

The only person who can truly hold his own against Fox who actually gets an invitation once in a while is Jon Stewart, and that’s only because O’Reilly vs. Stewart is always a ratings bonanza and because the network generally gets a crack at selectively editing any confrontation between Stewart and a Fox News host before it hits air. The rest are of the Dennis Kucinich variety: unthreatening glass jaws that can be pushed around with relative ease and who seem blissfully unaware that they’re basically wearing a big “KICK ME” sign on their backs every time they step on-set.

Their presence on the network proves nothing except that Fox is unwilling to face a foe that can not just take a punch but can throw one back and have it land with devastating authority.

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Not defending the man, but the point

By Chez Pazienza: I didn’t want this to turn into a public back-and-forth, but when I wrote a piece last week for this site on the double-standard when it comes to how news outlets cover crimes which are racially motivated or have the potential to be racially motivated, I knew I might be opening a Pandora’s Box. So with that in mind, and after my good friend and podcast partner Bob Cesca penned a response to my original column here a few days ago, I feel like I want to clarify and expand on my views a little.

First of all, I really do hate the fact that even though my motives are much different and I have to believe more noble than theirs, my opinion gets to be lumped in with the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Bernie Goldberg. I don’t like that it looks like I’m defending them when I’m simply defending a point they’ve made — again, regardless of why they made that point. It should also go without saying that I hope I’m not labeled some kind of racist — or a latent racist, unaware of my own racist feelings, a charge that’s almost impossible to defend against — by those who disagree with me on this. I want to make it clear that while O’Reilly and Goldberg seemed to suggest an equivalence between the incident in Virginia and the Trayvon Martin shooting, I did nothing of the sort; they’re completely different cases and they should have been treated differently by the press.

The issue, though, is larger than an unfair comparison between two separate and distinctive events.

I’m not saying that the media don’t report black-on-white crime. Of course they do. Jesus, in a lot of places — mostly local news markets — it’s almost all they do. The difference — the double-standard — occurs when it comes time to tag a crime as racially motivated or to acknowledge a racial component within a crime. When there’s a possibility of labeling a crime racially motivated, the burden of proof is much higher in a black-on-white crime than it is in one that’s white-on-black. I understand completely the history involved — which Bob outlined nicely — and how and why that can come into play, but I’m still not sure that makes it right from the standpoint of journalistic ethics. From what I’ve seen, it would take a person or a group literally shouting “I hate white people” while kicking somebody’s ass for many in the media to report that a black-on-white crime had racial overtones — and if it didn’t appear at first glance to have overt racial overtones they almost certainly wouldn’t go looking any deeper for them.

Again, I do understand the lengthy and incontrovertible history that deserves consideration, but a group of white people beating up on a black person is automatically very suspicious — as it damn well should be — while a group of black people beating up on someone of another race or ethnicity is deemed, what? Business as usual? Just the way things are? Doesn’t the refusal to even acknowledge the racial element in a story like that — particularly when the coverage would be far different were the roles reversed — speak to Goldberg’s claim that the media may be trying to play a paternal role in protecting a minority community from the bigots who’d automatically label them savages or criminals? If so, is it the media’s job to play that paternal role?

There’s no denying that a news organization can often be influenced, sometimes very quietly, by factors not related to the goal of practicing journalism. On my site I’ve written often about the subtle pressure exerted on news producers to be cognizant of any possible liberal bias within their work — a product of years of accusations and strong-arming by the right — and how that can often lead a news department to overcompensate. True objectivity goes out the window in an effort to ensure that conservative critics are appeased — in other words, in the pursuit of the appearance of objectivity. Likewise, there’s an interesting guideline in place in many newsrooms — occasionally unspoken but often discussed openly — that tips its cards to the incredibly delicate way the press handles the subject of race and minority crime. It works like this: If a crime has been committed and the only description you have of the suspect is, say, a black male, 5’11″, wearing a white t-shirt, you don’t air or publish the description. Why? Well, because obviously that would mean police are currently on the lookout for six thousand people; the description is worthless. But its vagueness and consequent lack of value isn’t really the reason the description wouldn’t be run; there have been quite a few times throughout my career where it’s been acknowledged in my presence, and admittedly even affirmed by me, that a non-specific description of an African-American suspect is unfair to the black community.

True, a sketch of a suspect that ambiguous would likely be left out of a story regardless of that suspect’s race or ethnicity, but special attention was always paid to those who were wanted by the police and who happened to be black, often in an effort to avoid inflaming racial tensions or giving fuel to bigots. Of course, again, there’s a history to be considered here, a history of black people being unfairly targeted as suspicious due to nothing more than the color of their skin — see, yes, Trayvon Martin — and maybe it does in fact show journalistic responsibility and an acquiescence to the realities of the world to take that into consideration when publishing or airing a news item. I think this is the argument Bob was making in his piece and he could very well be right. But from a perspective that I hope is as dispassionate as it can be, the question of fairness and paternalism again comes up: Is it the job of a journalistic organization to favor one group over another or to treat one group differently in their coverage — to show it special dispensation or handle it with kid gloves not applied when dealing with anyone else?

One final thing before we hopefully put what I think has been a healthy debate to rest: By talking about this issue I want to make it clear that I’m not at all personally outraged about the double-standard in black-vs.-white press coverage nor am I crying that I’m being racially persecuted, as O’Reilly and Goldberg most certainly were. I’m a white guy living in the United States of America — I’ve got it fucking great. I’m merely pointing out that the double-standard exists and that there’s a very strong argument to be made that it does actually defy the rules of a responsible and unbiased press. Am I hedging a little because of the sensitive nature of this subject — wearing those kid gloves, as it were? Sure am. Is it somewhat cowardly to allow any kind of potential pressure or backlash to influence what I say or the way I say it? Perhaps.

But that was sort of the point I was initially making. Or at the very least, the question I was asking.

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