Bill O'Reilly: The latest public moralizer with feet of clay
Bill O'Reilly is the latest public moralist brought low by personal scandal. The champion of the "traditional family unit," the opponent of "a do-your-own-thing" morality is involved in a nasty divorce in which he tried to have ex-wife's new husband investigated, and seeks an annulment after 15-year marriage and two children.
"Is the traditional America gone for good?" thundered Bill O'Reilly, the mighty mouth of Fox News, in November after President Obama defied the predictions of Fox propagandists and handily won re-election.
The column brought together most of O'Reilly's themes -- it was a little too early in the year for the "war on Christmas" -- such as "creeping secularism," a "do-your-own-thing" mentality among the young, African-Americans' out-of-wedlock births, decline of the "traditional family unit" and "no judgments about personal behavior."
Mitt Romney had pigeonholed 47 percent of American voters. O'Reilly used the characterization to demean the majority who voted for Obama, even sneering that pro-Obama Catholics were less likely to go to mass.
If you read John Cook's Gawker piece, however, you'll see that O'Reilly's "traditional family unit" had already dissolved at the time of his post-election thunder, and that his "personal behavior" will be judged by many as despicable.
The facts, according to Gawker:
-- O'Reilly used his ties with the Nassau County (N.Y.) police department to try to launch an internal affairs investigation after a detective on the force started dating his estranged wife, Maureen McPhilmy.
-- McPhilmy and BillO have since divorced, and McPhilmy has married the detective. She and O'Reilly are engaged in a "scorched Earth" custody battle over their two children. O'Reilly has hired, at a six-figure salary, the woman he and his former wife had agreed on to serve as a neutral arbiter in the suit.
-- The arbiter has been working days and some nights at O'Reilly's home. In a court opinion, the judge said: "The mother further alleged that, after execution of the agreement, the father had hired the children's therapist as a full-time employee to perform virtually all of his parental duties."
-- O'Reilly's former wife has been reprimanded by her diocese for continuing to receive communion in her Long Island Catholic church despite having been divorced and remarried (as hundreds of thousands of American Catholics do). The reprimand instructs her to stop telling her children that her second marriage is valid in the eyes of God.
BillO is reportedly seeking an annulment of his 15-year marriage, despite the fact that it produced two children. In the "annulment factories" run by many dioceses, his application should be a slam dunk. He did a chummy interview with New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan and gave $65,000 to various Catholic schools and parishes in 2011.
Private lives are private lives, but public moralists -- those who are the first to cast stones -- deserve to be judged by a higher standard.
O'Reilly was, on the air last week, screaming at and interrupting a Denver Post editorial writer who had called him out on an ugly reference to the fact that Colorado's House speaker is gay. BillO described his guest as a liar and lacking in personal ethics.
What, then, of the ethics of a man who seeks to have his soon-to-be ex-wife's boyfriend harassed and investigated at his workplace? Who sneers at Kennedy family indiscretions, but then follows the path of ex-Rep. Joseph Kennedy II and tries to annul a fairly long marriage that produced children?
Our public moralists, so often, have feet of clay.
We've learned of the sexual peccadilloes of Revs. Billy James Hargis, Jimmy Swaggart ("I have sinned, Lord"), Jim Bakker and Ted Haggard. In several of these cases, those who preached most loudly against the "homosexual agenda" had themselves been engaged in the sins of Sodom.
The late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina went to the ramparts for Southern white womanhood, opposing the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling with warnings that school integration would lead to miscegenation, or -- in words I remember from long-ago civil rights debates -- "mixing of the races."
He was, we learned after Thurmond's death, himself a mixer . . . the father of a daughter whose mother was an African-American servant in the Thurmond family home, a secret kept for three-quarters of a century. No wonder about all those jokes that they would have trouble closing his casket.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich was out on the hustings in 1998-99 decrying the personal immorality of Bill Clinton, milking the Monica Lewinsky scandal and promoting impeachment for what was really grounds for divorce.
How could he do this, second wife Marianne asked Gingrich, when he was carrying on an affair with the woman who would become Mrs. Newt No. 3. The answer: "Nobody else can do what I do."
The insufferable Gingrich was on the presidential trail last year, talking about faith and morals and forgiveness and his newfound Catholic faith.
Bill O'Reilly has now advanced the breed into secular broadcasting, although his bosses at the network that extolls the "stability" of straight marriage -- Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch -- are each three-time bridegrooms.
BillO is likely to keep bullying and bamboozling his dull, drilled, docile and very elderly audience.
As to the resut of us, there's a lesson: Shut out, or at least suspect, the grifters who loudly proclaim themselves holier than thou.
The Gospels are full of warnings about the Pharisees, who are with us still. Who was it, the ancient prophet Jeremiah, I think, who declared that the prophets prophesy falsely, and the high priests rule by their words.
In these loud, often vulgar times, we should take the time to look for the anti-O'Reillys . . . those who do not proclaim their own virtue and try to dictate behavior, but rather quietly preach the unheroic virtues of patience, tolerance, justice, learning, forebearance and understanding.
It is only by such seeking that the savageness of our nation's discourse will be tamed, and we will again bring civility and cooperation to our national life. The "better angels of our nature" is the REAL Traditional America.
source
the latest O'Reilly article at Gawker