Culture Warrior

by Bill O'Reilly

  Taking the evidence presented, I believe it is fair to say that not only does the S-P movement sympathize with child predators because of their “disease”; they are also making it easier for these criminals to operate. To prove this, we must travel to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a reliable stronghold of secular-progressive thought.

  Earlier in this book, I mentioned that the ACLU is representing the North American Man-Boy Love Association in a civil lawsuit. That case, I argued, proves that the ACLU is not only misguided, it is dangerous. Here are some more details that, I hope, prove this point once and for all. We begin with the fact that the ACLU believes NAMBLA’s “rights” are being violated. So please consider that the starting point of this terrible situation.

  On October 1, 1997, ten-year-old Jeffrey Curley was playing in the front yard of his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. A few yards away, two men, Salvatore Sicari and Charles Jaynes, were watching Jeffrey from their parked car.

  Sicari and Jaynes talked it over—could they kidnap the boy and get away unseen? It was risky in broad daylight, but the men, losers both, decided to try. Leaping out of the car, they grabbed the boy, threw him inside, and sped off. But Jeffrey fought back hard. Finally, the men suffocated the boy with a gasoline-soaked rag and drove to Jaynes’s apartment, where they sexually abused Jeffrey’s body. Afterward, they drove to Maine, where they dumped the young boy’s corpse into a river. It does not get worse than this.

  Massachusetts detectives did a great job on the case, and both Sicari and Jaynes received life in prison. During court testimony, Jaynes’s diary was introduced. In said diary was a description of the NAMBLA Web site and Jaynes’s writing that it encouraged him to act out his violent fantasies on young boys. As I told you earlier, Jaynes accessed the NAMBLA Web site at the Boston Public Library. Remember, the ACLU and S-P movement want no restrictions on library Internet access.

  Not surprisingly, Jeffrey Curley’s family was so appalled by the NAMBLA connection that they filed a $200 million federal lawsuit against the group, seeking to put it out of business once and for all. It fell to the Curley family to attempt to do what the U.S. justice system has been unable to do—crush NAMBLA.

  By the way, it is worth noting that one of the most popular NAMBLA publications is titled “The Survival Manual: The Man’s Guide to Staying Alive in Man-Boy Sexual Relationships.” This revolting “manual” explains how to insinuate yourself into a child’s life and get away with molesting the boy. Sick doesn’t even begin to cover it.

  After the Curley family filed its suit, it was answered—by the ACLU. The S-P shock troops took the case to “protect” the free-speech rights of NAMBLA. ACLU Massachusetts legal director John Reinstein said in a press release: “Regardless to whether people agree with or abhor NAMBLA’s views, holding the organization responsible for crimes committed by others who read their material would gravely endanger important first amendment freedoms.”

  Once again, a theoretical argument is put forth to defend active evil. As with the war on terror, the S-P vanguard cannot come to grips with the fact that NAMBLA has no place in any civilized society, is an organization that appears to be criminal, encouraging child rape, and should be put out of business any legal way possible. But in the “anything goes” world of the secular-progressives, theory is much more important than protecting the kids.

  One more item to bolster my argument: the ACLU’s war against the Boy Scouts has received a lot of attention. Very simply, the Scouts decline to approve openly gay Scoutmasters and require that the boys acknowledge a “higher power.” The ACLU sees this as a violation of gay and atheist rights, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that the Scouts and all other private organizations have the right to make their own charters and rules.

  So, all over the country, the ACLU has sued the Boy Scouts, seeking to have them denied public assistance and access, such as having a jamboree on city property. It is a jihad against the Scouts, no question. Once again doing the math, I have come up with this equation: NAMBLA gets ACLU support. The Boy Scouts get ACLU attacks. Am I wrong here?

  Finally, let’s go back to school, where the S-P assault on American children is being intensely waged under the guise of looking out for the kids. Besides abortion, the one issue that will drive any secular-progressive crazy is school “vouchers” for disadvantaged children.

  Because so many public schools are ineptly run and even dangerous to attend, states like Florida have provided assistance to poor families who wish to send their children to private schools. In the high school where I taught in the 1970s—Monsignor Edward Pace in Opa Locka, Florida—forty low-income students were receiving tuition assistance from the state. But the S-P Florida Supreme Court—you remember, the one that ruled in favor of Al Gore in the 2000 election and was overturned by the Supreme Court—decided that Florida violated its constitution by directing fees to private schools. Predictably, the court rationalized its ruling by invoking the separation of church and state theory. But in the real world, where most of us have to live, many of the poor children involved were forced to return to violent, chaotic public schools.

  The secular-progressives will tell you they are looking out for your “rights” and the overall welfare of children in the school voucher debate. But that’s an impossible argument to win when you realize that a poor kid doesn’t have the same “rights” as a rich kid to attend a school their parents choose. This is flat-out classism and a stark denial of equal opportunity.

  But, as we’ve learned, the true S-P agenda wants nothing to do with the traditional Judeo-Christian values that are taught in most private schools. That is really the issue here. The separation of church and state argument is just a ruse, and there’s proof. After World War II, more than 2 million veterans were given educational “vouchers” paid for by the government in order to afford to attend the college of their choice. Many of those vets chose religious colleges. Back then, the S-P movement was in its infancy and little was said.

  But over the years, as the S-P forces in America grew in strength, the opposition to all government assistance involving any religious affiliation intensified. It came to a head in a 1999 lawsuit involving educational assistance to the poor in Cleveland. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that as long as the government didn’t force an American student to attend a religious school, there was nothing un-Constitutional about supplying poor American families with money to attend any school of their “choice.”

  This entire issue, of course, is about free choice and the Constitutional right to pursue happiness on an equal basis. Using a variety of studies, ABC newsman John Stossel has documented that poor kids who use vouchers to attend private schools dramatically improve their academic performance. So the intense S-P opposition to school vouchers isn’t exactly “nurturing” poor children, now is it?

  Want more evidence that S-P opposition to school vouchers damages kids? Try this: In Washington, D.C., according to the National Center for Education Statistics, public school spending on each pupil is now over $10,000 per child per year, an astounding amount and about double what it was thirty years ago. D.C. Catholic schools spend far less per pupil than the public schools do. And—you guessed it—test scores for the Catholic school kids are far higher than those for the public school students. In fact, 98 percent of kids graduating from D.C. Catholic schools go on to college, while almost 40 percent of D.C. public school students never graduate from high school; they drop out. Once again, the math tells the story. Too bad so many public school kids will never learn how to do math.

  The sad truth is there are few public schools in the United States that can compete with private schools because of the discipline factor. Private schools work intensely with parents and demand that strict academic and behavioral guidelines be followed. In many public schools, “self-esteem” is the lesson of the day, and social promotion the school fight song.

  And once a kid gets to college, well, forget about hearing the traditional point of v
iew very much. Most American universities have become secular-progressive theme parks. Even once-traditional schools like Georgetown and Villanova have suffered a large infusion of S-P influence.

  In fact, a study by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA surveyed more than fifty-five thousand college professors about their political beliefs. Asked to describe themselves ideologically, 48 percent said they were “liberal” or “far left,” 18 percent said “conservative” or “far right,” and 34 percent described themselves as “middle of the road.”

  But wait a minute. What exactly does “middle of the road” mean on America’s college campuses? It is impossible to nail down completely, but let me offer this insight: In the mid-nineties, as I mentioned, I attended Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I learned a lot there and am proud of earning a master’s degree in public administration with decent grades.

  Press and media studies at the Kennedy School are done in the Shorenstein Center, which is headed up by former New York Times reporter Alex Jones, a committed liberal. But Professor Jones does not see himself that way. He believes he’s a fair and balanced guy and said so on The O’Reilly Factor. He also said the New York Times is not a liberal newspaper and the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, Jon Carroll, whom Jones hired to teach at the Kennedy School, is not a liberal guy either.

  I thought that analysis fascinating, because while at the L.A. Times, Mr. Carroll hired far-left bomb-thrower Michael Kinsley to run the editorial page, which also featured radical S-P icon columnists like Robert Scheer. Under Carroll, the Times lurched to the left, and drastically declined in circulation. Maybe that was a coincidence, but Carroll eventually quit. Soon after his departure, Kinsley and Scheer were fired by the Tribune Company, which owns the L.A. Times.

  Now, I could be wrong (have I said that before?). I mean, maybe Jones, Carroll, Kinsley, and Scheer are all “middle of the road.” I can only go by what they’ve written and what they’ve said. I can’t read their minds.

  Professor Jones, I believe, sincerely thinks he’s a nonpartisan educator. Again, maybe he is. The point here is that in academic circles “middle of the road” is completely different from what it would be in, say, Tupelo, Mississippi. I believe it is safe to assume that on most college campuses in the United States, S-P thought rules, at least in public.

  Nowhere is that point better illustrated than at the University of Colorado. This is the home of radical professor Ward Churchill, the unhinged “ethnic studies” professor who proudly proclaimed that many of the Americans killed on 9/11 were “little Eichmanns” who deserved their fate because they were evil capitalists. You remember the outcry over that.

  Well, despite all the controversy and serious questions about Churchill’s background and scholarship, he emerged as a hero among many in the secular-progressive community. But he’s not a hero to me.

  So when I heard that Hamilton College in upstate New York had hired Churchill to speak on campus, I really let the college have it on radio and TV. Why pay this guy money to spew that kind of hate? I asked. Doesn’t anyone care that his vile words bring pain to the families who lost people in the World Trade Center attack? Would Hamilton be hiring David Duke to speak anytime soon?

  Hamilton folded. Churchill did not speak.

  As soon as the decision to throw this loon overboard was made, the S-P media sprang into action. It was the usual bilge: O’Reilly’s a fascist, a bully, a terrible human being in every way. Secular-progressive columnist Richard Cohen, who writes for the Washington Post, was distraught over the Churchill situation:

  Then Bill O’Reilly struck. The Fox TV commentator went to town on the controversy, finding the usual liberal idiocy at the usual liberal college perpetuated by the usual liberal morons. Having rounded up his usual suspects, O’Reilly ended a segment about Hamilton by providing the name of the college’s president, Joan Hinde Stewart, her e-mail address and the school’s phone number.

  Then, blood dripping from his evil heart, he asked his deranged viewers to “keep your comments respectable.” The school caved.

  Now, Richard Cohen is one of the most fanatical S-P media people working today. He truly hates me and obviously despises the “deranged” millions all over the world who watch The Factor. Of course, I couldn’t care less, and I don’t hate him. In fact, the only thing about Cohen that even registered on my radar is that he often used personal attacks in his column to smear those with whom he disagreed.

  But, I’m pleased to say, Richard Cohen no longer does that very much. After I gently advised him on the air to cease and desist from the smear tactics, he did. Good for him.

  However, Cohen’s decision may have had something to do with karma. In May 2006 he wrote in the Washington Post that television satirist Stephen Colbert had bombed while doing a monologue at the Washington White House Correspondents dinner. Immediately Cohen was barraged by hundreds of hateful e-mails. Apparently two far-left smear Web sites had urged their readers to attack Cohen. The writer called the chorus a “digital lynch mob”: “It seemed that most of my correspondents had been egged on to attack me by various blogs…. All in all, I was—I am, and I guess I remain—the worthy object of ignorant, false and downright idiotic vituperation.”

  I know how you feel there, Richard. What I don’t understand is why this is news to you. As the aforementioned NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin wrote about the vile Web sites Media Matters and Think Progress: “[They] encourage people to express strong feelings; the level of pure acrimony seemed to me to rise to the level of hate speech.”

  Even the ombudsman for NPR knows the score.

  Summing up, there is no question that the S-P movement is firmly entrenched on most college campuses and is making a lot of progress in public secondary and grammar schools. That is worrisome. The educational battlefield is a key area in the culture war. Here, especially, traditional forces are on the defensive and are heavily outnumbered. Right now American voters renounce secular-progressive initiatives again and again. But will that hold twenty years from today?

  That, for the traditional warrior, is the key question.

  What’s goin’ on?

  —MARVIN GAYE

  A friend of mine spied an African American woman reading one of my books on an Amtrak train and, smiling, brought it to my attention. He thought it was great but was a bit surprised. He should not have been. Many African Americans are deeply traditional, though they might vote Democratic or even be liberal thinkers.

  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a traditionalist. In almost every public statement he made, he called upon God to inspire him and deliver justice. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he wrote: “[Civil rights protesters stand for] the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy.”

  Did I read that right? “Our Judeo-Christian heritage”? Of course, Dr. King understood that to mean the traditional tenets of freedom for all, justice for all, and generosity of spirit and with material things. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words are more important than ever, because the S-P movement not only scorns Judeo-Christian philosophy, some of its members even deny America has a heritage based on that philosophy.

  Bill Cosby is also a traditionalist. He travels the country urging black Americans to return to the American traditions of self-discipline, self-reliance, and self-respect. Cosby understands that moral relativism is not helping black Americans overcome their historical disadvantages. The key to success, as Cosby well knows, is a strong traditional education and hard work.

  And, surprise, the Reverend Jesse Jackson is a traditionalist, at least in some ways. The proof came when he sided with Terri Schiavo’s family in the controversy over whether the Florida woman should be removed from life support. Jackson opined that any mistake made in the emotional case should be made on the side of life. The S-Ps must have hated that.

  Once again, not all liberals are secular-progressives, and not all Democrats approv
e of the S-P vision. And that is certainly true with the African American community.

  Although 89 percent of blacks voted Democratic in 2004, when it comes to social issues African Americans are largely in the traditional camp. A Pew Research Center poll taken in July 2005 found that 75 percent of black Americans believe secular-progressives push too far in keeping religion out of schools and government. Only 17 percent of African American voters want to legalize gay marriage—an overwhelming statement of traditionalist conviction.

  Those attitudes, strongly held, are a disaster for the S-P movement, which is why you rarely see any blacks associated with it. The ACLU is almost entirely white, as is Air America, as is the George Clooney S-P crew in Hollywood.

  George Soros and Peter Lewis, the big S-P moneymen, travel in almost exclusively white circles. Bill Moyers and his media followers are all a whiter shade of pale, to quote an old Procol Harum rock song.

  Because the African American political establishment is largely locked into one issue—advancement of blacks through government largesse—African Americans remain largely on the sidelines in the culture war. Generally speaking, taking up the battle is simply not relevant to them, because traditionalists have not defined the culture war to coincide with their interests. I believe that is a huge mistake.

  In many black communities, Christian churches are prominent centerpieces. Faith is an important tradition in black America. That’s why the gay marriage issue is overwhelmingly rejected by blacks. Their religion says homosexuality is not acceptable, and many African Americans bitterly resent the argument that marriage for homosexuals is a civil right. If you want a lively discussion, walk into a black church and put that on the table.