Why does Bill O’Reilly hate religious freedom?

November 12, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

It has come to this: The gang at the Republican Party Media Relations Office — I’m sorry, I mean “Fox News Channel” — is so desperate to whip up claims that Christmas is under attack that it actually undertook a campaign to turn a routine and benign calendar change into a major controversy.

Officials in Hillsborough County, Fla., recently decided to adopt a new policy on religious holidays. Students were off around between Christmas and New Years, as well as Good Friday and certain Jewish holidays. When a Muslim group requested schools be closed for the end of Ramadan, the board knew it had to do something or else too many days would be lost.

The board’s decision was Solomonic: It voted to keep the schools closed during the Christmas season, since the end of the year provides a natural division for the academic calendar. It dropped the closings at Easter and for the Jewish holidays but adopted a policy allowing students, teachers and staff generous leave for any religious holiday. A Jewish student, for example, could stay home for Yom Kippur with no questions asked and no penalty.

Sounds reasonable, right? In fact, similar policies had been adopted by neighboring districts and local governments.

What happened next is predictable: A grandstanding local politician, Brian Blair, began screaming that religion was under attack by “the far left.” Bill O’Reilly got a hold of the story and carped about it for more than a week. Fox News reporters descended on the area, offering team coverage as if another hurricane had struck.

I’m sure it was a challenge to take a policy that preserves Christmas break and that guarantees people time off to celebrate their religious holidays and make it sound like the worst thing to happen to Christianity since the persecutions of the Emperor Diocletian, but the Fox gang managed. With passions running high, local Muslims began receiving hateful messages. Blair told CBS News that maybe they should go live somewhere else.

The school board, also flooded with hate messages and harassed by an e-mail campaign orchestrated by Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, quickly backed down and reinstated the old calendar.

The end result is this: A policy that would have accommodated all religions by guaranteeing people of all faiths the time off they need for observances has been scrapped — in the name of religious freedom.

For this we can all thank that great champion of religious liberty and tolerance, Bill O’Reilly.

Disgusting. It’s the bait-and-switch you always expected to see when you started hearing religious conservatives crow about religious freedoms whenever a church/state issue came up. This is exactly the reason for the first amendment.

WE ARE NOT A GODDAMN JUDEO-CHRISTIAN COUNTRY!

  • Funny how the standard has been changed. When I was a kid, the wingnuts used to insist that we are a “white Christian country”, and were quite openly racist and anti-Semitic. Now they have expanded their circle to include African-Americans and Jews, which is good. So now we are supposedly a “Judeo-Christian Country”.

    Well, while we’re including people of the bible, why not include Islam? Same bible, lots of similarities. So then we’d be a “Judeo-Christian-Islamic Country”. And then we might as well acknowledge our substantial Asian populations in states like California and New York, and become a “Judeo-Chrisian-Islamic-Confucian-Buddhist-Hindu Country”.

    And then why don’t we just drop all this horseshit and just be a secular country, and let people pick their own fucking religion.

    I’m tired of playing this game of who’s-going-to-exclude-whom. We’re all in this together.

  • My father (b. 1906) grew up in South Philadelphia. He told me that his public school, in one of the worst slums in America (home to many notorious gangsters), took holidays all the time: Jewish ones, Italian ones, Irish ones, German ones, religious and secular. And yet they all seemed to get educated. My dad only went through his sophomore year in high school (had to work to help support his mother and sisters), but read voraciously from the public library and wrote excellent letters longhand without a spell- or grammar-checker. So did many of those who went to school with him. In fact his whole generation seems, to me, to have been much better educated in fundamentals than the one currently coming out of our colleges and universities.

  • We’ve got Dover, PA in G*d’s crosshairs because the creationists on the school board got the boot. San Francisco has been donated to “the terrorists” by Shrill Billy O’ due to it’s lack of cooperation with the NRA. New Orleans has been smote down by a fetus shaped hurricane for it’s accumulated sins. And Hillsborough County has now barely dodged a holy bullet to it’s bedeviled heart by purchasing an indulgence and kneeling before the alter of the Amerikan Family Association and Faux News.

    Soon there will be nothing but devastated Sodom and Gomorrah’s spread across the land punctuated by sacred sites such as Kansas and South Carolina, (if Christian Exodus gets it’s way).

    Best get right with G*d. Judgement day is coming. And he will smile most broadly upon those with the most money, influence and power. Oh yeah.

  • There’s something funny about this,
    though. What days off do the
    secularists get, the atheists, the
    humanists, the deists, the agnostics,
    the pagans, et al?

    Why do we enshrine religion as
    something, well, holy in America,
    as in holidays?

  • Sort of puts the lie to the idea that the “Intelligent Designer” could be anything from a Venusian to a face on a tortilla.

    From Americablog:

    Pat Robertson says “Intelligent Design” is really about the Christian God
    by John in DC – 11/11/2005 07:05:00 PM

    Well, as AMERICAblog reader Russ points out, Pat Robertson pretty much just destroyed any possible chance the intelligent design folks had, anywhere. Robertson said yesterday that since a Pennsylvania school district voted out all 8 of its school board members who support intelligent design, they can expect God’s wrath to come down on them.

    Now, call me crazy, but if intelligent design doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with God, then why will God’s wrath come down on a town that voted that ridiculous theory down?

    Anybody out there fighting the intelligent design folks, please use this. Pat Robertson just admitted that intelligent design is about teaching our kids all about the Christian God in school.

    Thanks Pat. You’re the gift that keeps on giving.

  • Years ago, in my company, we handled
    this by giving everyone certain time off
    from work, for whatever reason. We
    called it “vacation time.” It worked
    quite well. We were very flexible
    in scheduling, so those who chose
    religious observances in lieu of
    strictly leisure time were always
    accommodated. Many other companies
    allowed what they called “personal days,”
    as a solution. That way, everyone was
    treated equally, and fairly. We don’t
    have to throw religion into it. We simply
    acknowledge that every human being
    has a few days a year that are important
    to him or her, for whatever reason.
    No questions asked.

    Now it seems we’re tying ourselves
    up in knots over religious holidays.

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