Fox doesn’t do news, it does persuasion.
Its talk shows, which are pure demagoguery, are by far its most popular fare.
And its hosts are close-minded, intellectually dishonest pot-stirrers and hatemongers. They’re also liars.
Take Laura Ingraham, for example, one of Fox‘s worst offenders for playing fast and loose with truth.
In May 2019, she said Joe Biden was against same-sex marriage and only voiced support for it because political consultants told him to. If she’d done her homework, she would’ve known Biden said in 2012, on “Meet the Press,” that he personally supported marriage rights for gay people.
Now that Biden has signed the Respect for Marriage Act, a Democratic-sponsored law seeking to preempt any Supreme Court overturn of gay marriage rights, and celebrated it (the White House was illuminated with rainbow lights), Ingraham is singing a different tune.
It goes like this: The new law will destroy the nuclear family. (Never mind that gay marriage is already legal.) It takes away religious rights, and even freedom of speech. She actually said, “whether you’re Catholic or evangelical or maybe Muslim, any serious person of faith, you will not necessarily have the rights tomorrow that you had yesterday.”
Raw Story replied, “She did not state what rights people of faith allegedly lost on Tuesday when President Biden signed a law that changes little” (see story here). Of course she didn’t, because she’s lying.
She can’t explain to me or anyone else how gays getting married in Vermont disrupts a family in Iowa, keeps people in North Carolina from attending a church of their choice, or silences anyone. It sure doesn’t silence her! It turns a crank that makes her talk more. (Click on image at right to activate jack-in-box.)
Oh, and to make sure we don’t miss that she’s in the unadulterated-hate business, she played the “aberrant behavior” card, too. This phrase is a synonym for “gays are coming for your children.”
While wedding ceremonies are often performed as religious rites, in America marriage is a secular relationship important for its legal rights. These include the right to inherit, own community property, sign certain legal documents, and visit a sick partner in the hospital. Take away the marriage right and you take away many of those rights, too. Gay people take away no one’s rights by getting married; but gay-marriage opponents really are trying to take away other people’s rights.
Being gay isn’t “aberrant,” it’s a biological condition people are born with. And contrary to what anti-gay bigots claim, the human sexes aren’t limited to male and female. There are people caught in the middle, not by choice, because nature made them that way. Who, in this country, in their right mind would choose to be gay?
I once asked a scientist who wrote a college textbook about the social behavior of animals living in the wild if homosexuality exists outside the human species. The answer, from objective studies and observations, is that many animal species exhibit homosexual behavior and in roughly the same proportion as the human species. We also know from science and the field of medicine that chromosomes can get mixed up. Homosexuality is a physical condition, not a chosen behavior.
You can’t convince some people of the truth, any more than you can persuade them to accept the basic fact that Covid-19 vaccines work, are safe, and save lives. You can’t get those people to believe something they don’t want to believe, especially when they have propagandists like Ingraham maliciously inciting them with falsehoods and hate.
If Ingraham really wants to shore up the nuclear family, I can suggest a couple places to start. One, Christian ministers cheating with their parishioners’ wives. Do I really need to write here about Christian hypocrisy? I don’t think so. Two, angry, crazy men with guns that should be taken away from them before they shoot their families, responding cops, and then themselves.
To make myself perfectly clear, there’s plenty enough constructive work to do getting people who call themselves “Christians” to act their faith that she doesn’t need to spend time butting into the private lives of LGBQT people. The fact she does is a moral failing, and a big one.
I say “big” because the problem is millions of people listen to her, and she stokes their insecurities and ignorance with the fires of hate. They then go out into society with what she’s planted in their ossified minds and harass — and sometimes even kill — LGBQT people.
America is a free country, with free speech, and I’m not suggesting anyone shut up her. But free speech doesn’t mean we can’t criticize bad, harmful, destructive, hateful speech. I’m suggesting she shut herself up.
She won’t, of course, because she makes a lot of money doing this, and Fox makes a ton of money by putting her on the air. Ingraham isn’t some simple-minded nitwit who grew up in a trailerpark and doesn’t know better; she graduated from Dartmouth and has a law degree. She’s in it for the money, and so are the Murdochs, who own and run Fox, and give a huge megaphone to her ilk. She’s a mercenary, and they’re mercenaries.
The Murdochs and Ingraham make gobs of money by packaging and selling hate. It’s free speech, which I wouldn’t take away from anyone, but they’re not reputable, responsible, nor does this fall in the category of legitimate debate. It’s gutter talk.