Family Research Council President Tony Perkins will be on The O’Reilly Factor this evening (May 17) to discuss “Presidential leadership on protecting marriage” i.e. the Marriage Amendment. He is slated after the first segment at 8:15 PM ET. Here is a little preview of what we might hear from Tony this evening. There is growing apprehension from some on the political right over a perceived lack of zealousness on the part of President Bush concerning this issue. This might prompt some interesting discussion tonight. If you watch, feel free to come back here and discuss any issues they bring up.
F
Just what Bush needs right now. Making him tap dance further to the right is only going to annoy the middle ground voters who have pretty much decided they don’t like him.
Why don’t they like him? Iraq, Gas Prices, Spending, etc.
Gay marriage came in at less than .5% in the latest Harris poll on National Priorities.
https://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=665
Tony Perkins says “Ask Congress to Put Children First” while demanding that same-sex couples be denied marriage protections for them and their children.
Meanwhile in Australia the former Family Court Chief Justice, Alistair Nicholson, says same-sex couples should be able to receive the same freedoms and rights as other people and their children shouldn’t be discriminated against. His argument?
PUT CHILDREN FIRST IN GAY MARRIAGE
He says “I think it’s an act of cruelty, both to them and to the children because it seems to me that people are forgetting the children in all this.”
Maybe Perkins should pray that no one listens to his own advice.
“Just what Bush needs right now. Making him tap dance further to the right is only going to annoy the middle ground voters who have pretty much decided they don’t like him.”
I wonder if the gay community may come out the big winner in any new effort to pass the FMA. The country is so frustrated with Bush and the Republicans that this may be seen as a blatant attempt to distract the public (which it is).
The public may start demanding “enough with gay marriage already – what about Iraq, gas prices, Iran, ever increasing deficits, FEMA, Osama Bin Ladin, spying on Americans, phone bill tracing, and record profits for your oil buddies?”.
If they bring it up now, they may create a backlash that will keep it from coming around for several years to come.
The country is so frustrated with Bush and the Republicans that this may be seen as a blatant attempt to distract the public (which it is).
Maybe I’m being pessimistic, but I don’t think anyone has gone broke betting on the public’s willingness to be distracted.
It was a very short segment, probably suffering from edits to make room for more of the immigration stuff from today. He had both Perkins and Maggie Gallagher, author of The Case for Marriage, with only O’Reilly to balance out the anti-gay marriage position (sigh). The central issue for O’Reilly was that Laura Bush said last week that she didn’t think the Marriage Amendment should be a political issue. Gallagher agreed, while Perkins did not.
The impression I got from the short exchange was an even stronger conviction that the Fundamentalist Religious Right needs to be divorced from the Republican (or any) party. That power is like a drug to them; they got hooked on it in the 80’s and now show signs of withdrawal from Bush’s recent attempt to wean them ever so slightly off the GOP teat. If I hear one more of them claim to speak for me I will vomit on the spot.
David Roberts
I fear, David, you may need to spend the next 6 months walking around with a bucket slung from your neck.These people ARE going to go beyond mean and ugly, and we all know they can.But, you know the advice you’re going to get… “Take back the damn party!” :)(Gallagher and Perkins, with O’Reilly for “balance”. snort. I have the image of a skinny kid in the middle of a seesaw and two fat kids on one end complaining it’s not going up and down)
On a related note…in California there were 14 different petitions taken out for ballot measures against same-sex marriage. All 14 of them would have banned gay marriage in the California Constitution, and annulled Domestic Partnerships (California’s DP is almost as strong as Vermont’s Civil Unions).
Out of the 14 petitions, NONE qualified for the November ballot. These folks weren’t able to get one of their petitions enough signatures to put their amendments to a vote of the people of California (where the polls say it would probably have failed anyway because of the DP provisions).
Yep, fair and balanced means loading up one side and not providing opposition. I also love when O’Reilly says that he has no problem with gay marriage personally, but because the society does not want it, he will go with the society’s viewpoint.
Take back the damn party!
Hey, I’m trying. We sometimes have very dismal choices over here. My dad said the other day when watching some ridiculous exchange by senators who should know better but who are hoping to become president, “I don’t know how this country has survived this long”. He is a staunch Republican, as am I, but I would settle for anyone with character these days.
David Roberts
Did anyone notice the little snippet for the section before they cut to a commercial early on in the show? It had two guys wearing boas.
And, Maggie Gallagher was talking out of both sides of her mouth. She said she agreed that it should not be a political issue, but that we needed to protect marriage, and this is the only way to do it. I loved that neither of the two guests was able to provide any proof as to how exactly this was going to protect marriage. They are really grasping at straws here.
I’m happy that this Amdendment probably won’t gain ground and pass, but I’m sad to see these guys are still harping on it, and unlike Timothy, I think the public could still be distracted by the issue.
Quote from an old lady (and this we are remembering)
She said marriage. She meant us. She’s right. Of course.
“The central issue for O’Reilly was that Laura Bush said last week that she didn’t think the Marriage Amendment should be a political issue. Gallagher agreed, while Perkins did not.”
I think that is probably because Gallagher views banning gay marriage as a goal while Perkins views it as a means.
“I also love when O’Reilly says that he has no problem with gay marriage personally, but because the society does not want it, he will go with the society’s viewpoint.”
Interesting. On his radio show he regularly rails against the “secular humanists”. And when listing the traits of these evil secular humanists, the first one he mentions is that they support gay marriage.
I suspect O’Reilly probably doesn’t personally care all that much about gay marriage, one way or the other. He’s not very anti-gay and is definitely not a big fan of the ex-gays. I imagine he just accepts homosexuality as a small naturally occurring minority which shouldn’t be discriminated against.
But he also seems to prefer us to just be quiet and stop bugging people. I suspect he’d happily socialize with a nice well-dressed gay couple and have a great time but would be annoyed by a gay pride parade.
He views those who push for gay marriage as the enemy (he probably distinguishes between gay people and what he views as radical leftist activists). He buys into the idea that it’s just an attack on the church and Christianity (and for some tiny percent, it may be). And since his emeny wants gay marriage, he’s opposed. He probably hasn’t made the connection that those getting married are doing so for a reason, and it has nothing to do with destroying society.
But that’s just my guess.
One thing I find most disturbing about O’Reilly is the way he buys into Paul Cameron’s false assumption that if a pedophile (as in the Catholic Priest scandal) has an altar boy as a victim, then the perpetrator must be by definition a homosexual since the two are of the same gender.
From a Southern Poverty Law Center expose of Cameron’s work:
Yet child abuse, whether sexual or otherwise is almost always determined by availability of the victim, not gender. The highest rates of these occurrences involve the live in boyfriend of a mother with children. Abuse occurs equally between male and female children as a matter of happenstance yet the perpetrator is clearly heterosexual since the sole reason he’s there is to have sex with the child’s mother.
O’Reilly’s perpetuation of the Cameron myth, that if the victim of a male pedophile is a boy, then the perpetrator must be “gay” is one reason I find O’Reilly so intolerable.
Yep, Cameron’s stats aren’t derived from criminal databses.
He wouldn’t necessesrily be privy to them in his work.
He might have gotten it from hospitals and jails or ex gay or sex addict advocacies.
But then the people most likely to be put in those institutions might be gay, but not necessarily for criminal acts against a child.
By and large, it’s straight men who write and enforced the law MOST OFTEN against gay men.
And it’s straight men, who abuse women and children in much, much higher numbers, and who do less time for the offense.
This you heard from an LAPD intern with access to their data.