Bill O'Reilly: medium for the transmission of Religious Right lies

Bill O'Reilly likes to bring "traditionals" on his program to help him in his crusade against "s-p"s. I've written before, it's O'Reilly's way of helping a totalitarian movement present itself as mainstream.

Here's a couple of examples off the top of my head: Around the time that Rush Limbaugh made his typically inhumane comments about Michael J. Fox, O'Reilly brought on someone from the Religious Right so that she could lie about stem cell research and say that scientists don't even want to do embryonic stem cell research because its dangerous and causes brain cancer. More recently, O'Reilly had on someone from an anti-abortion organization that said that Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller has a crematorium in his clinic and somedays when the organization's protesters are standing outside dead baby ashes rain down on them. I kid you not.

That's nothing compared to O'Reilly's latest transmission. Yep. The credulous O'Reilly brought on one of Fox News' top notch analysts who told O'Reilly that there is a nation wide underground network of homosexual gangs that are causing harm to a lot of people. Here are three things you wouldn't know from watching the segment (but could probably guess unless you actually take O'Reilly seriously):
1. The story is almost totally bogus
2. The footage of the fight you see is stock footage of girls fighting over a man, not a lesbian gang fight.
3. The guest making the allegations is part of a megachurch whose leadership "publicly advocates against equal rights for gays and lesbians," according to the SPLC.

You might tend to shrug this off because of the sheer absurdity of it, but there is something very serious going on here. The Dominionist movement that Bill O'Reilly routinely interfaces with and helps to portray as "traditional" Americans wants to turn homosexuals into second class citizens or worse. And you'll notice that O'Reilly has yet to retract the story, and knowing O'Reilly, its unlikely that he will. So its likely that in the Dominionist movement this particular lie will start circulating and become part of the demonization process that is going on in these churches.

As I mentioned in the comments over at Orcinus, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discuss these sorts of demonization tactics emanating from the Dominionist movement and not draw parallels to other hate groups (e.g. the KKK or Nazis) who made up similar bogus stories about the targets of their hate. Those groups, too, attempted to appeal to a mass audience by claiming to be defending "traditional" values from a subversive element.