During Monday night’s broadcast of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly discussed the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision with fellow Fox News host Megyn Kelly. The two hosts first mocked women, and especially Sandra Fluke, who believe that this ruling is a way for businesses to limit women’s access to contraception. After the two hosts had finished telling women they were dumb for believing this, O’Reilly decided to bring up the ideological make-up of the current Supreme Court. He stated, in all seriousness, that if the court receives one more liberal justice, Americans will see a large-scale loss of freedom, much like in the past when the court made pro-slavery rulings.
Below is video of Kelly and O’Reilly ridiculing Sandra Fluke, courtesy of Media Matters:
How can either of these two call themselves journalists with disgusting behavior like that? They lit into Fluke with the relish one usually sees from internet trolls. It was absurd, awful and just downright mean-spirited. O’Reilly dismissed the need for contraception to be covered by health insurance, insisting that it is cheap as is. He and Kelly just stated that women should pay for birth control, especially the so-called abortifacients that Hobby Lobby opposes, out of their own pocket, like they did prior to the passage of the ACA. (Kelly also erroneously stated that emergency contraception terminates pregnancy. That is inherently false.) You could almost sense O’Reilly wanting to tell women to stop having so much sex.
Amazingly, the discussion got even worse.
Below is video of O’Reilly discussing what a more liberal SCOTUS will lead to, courtesy of Media Matters:
It was certainly bad enough to watch O’Reilly preach to women about personal responsibility and the supposed cheapness of birth control. He then goes completely over-the-top by implying that a more liberal Supreme Court could lead us down the road to slavery. He claimed that the ideological makeup of a court can lead to horrendous decisions that take away or impose on Americans’ freedoms and rights. He brought up pro-slavery decisions in the 19th century by the court. O’Reilly then segued into how one more liberal justice will lead to the American people losing all of their freedoms.
In O’Reilly’s mind, the Hobby Lobby decision was a major victory for civil rights. If you speak to any number of conservatives out there, they will immediately say this was about protecting religious freedom. That, quite frankly, is ridiculous. Freedom of religion stops whenever someone’s practice or adherence to their religious beliefs directly affects or impacts the rights and freedoms of another group. In this instance, the owners of Hobby Lobby and other like-minded businesses are able to say that they are protecting their religious beliefs by refusing to provide certain forms of birth control. However, by doing so, they are directly affecting the ability of women who work for them to obtain medication and medical supplies, possibly prescribed to them by a doctor, that women elsewhere can freely obtain.
That is the thing that conservatives like O’Reilly and Kelly fail to understand. You cannot provide rights to some people in this country if it is at the expense of others. Or perhaps it isn’t that they fail to understand this, they just willfully ignore it and say ‘Hooray for freedom!’
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