O'Reilly's Bigotry Makes Me Lose My Appetite

The French "Come As You Are" Campaign is meant to reflect the actually existing diversity of French society that goes to McDonalds.

O'Reilly proposes that straight people seeing an ad depicting a gay kid eating at McDonald's will lose their appetites, he belligerently declares that such a commercial will NEVER run in America, he insists that depicting actual people actually eating at McDonald's is a "political statement" at least when the people depicted are gay, and he suggests that depicting a gay person at McDonalds is the same as depicting al-Quaida at McDonalds.

O'Reilly is wrong in his every assertion. Few people give a hoot about seeing gay folks eating French fries, and know that at least some of the people eating French fries in McDonald's right now are probably gay anyway and the appetites of all but the ever-shrinking minority of the most fulminating bigots and closetcases among them are unaffected by these realizations. It is dispiriting enough to realize that corporations in America already behave more sanely outside of the US than they do here, but nonetheless, this commercial or its equivalent will run in America before Obama's Presidency is over, and O'Reilly can pout and stamp all he wants. In a multiculture like the US it is, of course, the lack of any but straight white folks that is clearly "a political statement" -- and the statement is for self-marginalizing bigotry. I suspect that O'Reilly will be made to apologize in some way for the gay folks are the same al-Quaida comment, or at any rate to lie that he didn't really mean it (just like he didn't mean it when he said San Francisco should be bombed). The knowledge that O'Reilly will have to live amidst the conspicuous signs of the secular multicultural America actually is, the one that proves him wrong about every hateful small thing he believes, the one that so traumatizes and terrifies him, actually makes me feel quite cheerful.

By way of conclusion, let me briefly change the subject just long enough to point out that if you are in France there are better things for you to be eating than McDonalds.