Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his Inauguration has produced anger and/or hurt feelings in many liberal and/or gay precincts. It’s hard to say this without sounding condescending, but I understand these feelings and sympathize with them.

Warren turns out to be somewhat worse than I thought he was back when, a few months ago, I rashly likened him to Henry Ward Beecher. I hadn’t fully appreciated that he contends Jews and atheists are automatically hellbound, for example. Or that he has declared assassination admissible when used against “evildoers,” such as the president of Iran. Or that, while he says gays are welcome to attend services at his Saddleback megachurch, he doesn’t let them (closet cases excepted, presumably) become members. (He doesn’t let heterosexuals who are living together in “sin” join, either.)

Nevertheless, the invitation to Warren looks to me like another of Obama’s brilliant chess moves.

Warren, first of all, is much, much less of a jerk than, say, Pat Robertson or James Dodson. He is polite and civil to people who are polite and civil to him, even people who (like Obama) disagree with him on subjects like whether or not abortion and same-sex marriage should be illegal. He recognizes that global warming, environmental degradation, gross economic inequality, and poverty are actual problems, not just excuses for godless liberals to impose big government programs. He does not go on television to fleece the faithful with “prayer requests.”

The President-elect is doing what he has said he would do from the beginning: he is reaching across lines of identity and ideology. Remember those wonderful lines from the 2004 keynote? “We worship an awesome God in the blue states… and, yes, we have some gay friends in the red states.” (I don’t worship any gods, whether awesome or lame, but when Obama said this I didn’t feel in the least slighted.) In the case of the Warren invitation, the reaching across is neither more nor less than an expression of inclusion and respect in the context of a ritual of the American civic religion. It is not an offer to surrender or compromise some principle. It is not a preemptive concession in some arcane negotiation. If anything, it suggests that when and if he does negotiate with the Christianist right, he will negotiate from strength, not weakness.

The Warren invitation should make it politically easier for Obama to change federal policies in an equal-rights direction where gays and lesbians are concerned, much as retaining Robert Gates at the Pentagon will make it politically easier for him to manage a withdrawal from Iraq. What the Warren invitation does is to show evangelicals that when (and if, but let’s hope there won’t be any ifs) Obama scraps “don’t ask, don’t tell,” starts providing federal support for contraception, and undoes the international “gag rule” on abortion counseling, he’s doing these things out of his sense of the general good, not lobbing ordnance in a culture war.

Warren supported Proposition 8, the California anti-same-sex-marriage initiative. Worse, he likens same-sex marriage to marriage between siblings, marriage between an adult and a child, and polygamy. But, according to beliefnet.com, he also says that he regards divorce as a much bigger threat than gay marriage—“a no-brainer,” he says. Also, he appears to be open to, maybe even supportive of, civil unions—something that Obama, and organized gaydom, ought to put to the test.

Warren has said that he has lots of gay friends. That’s easy to make fun of, but it’s not meaningless. In Gus Van Sant’s terrific film “Milk,” Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk helps defeat a 1978 anti-gay California proposition by rallying large numbers of gays to come out of the closet and make themselves known to friends, family, and co-workers. People who have gay friends have a hard time hating gay people. Eventually they have a hard time hating gayness itself.

Although Obama did a little better among evangelicals than did the last couple of Democratic nominees, the organized evangelical movement is never going to support him. But either it can oppose him passionately, contemptuously, and across the board, or it can oppose him respectfully, selectively, and without zeal, cooperating with him in some areas. Obama’s Warren gesture should nudge some non-negligible number of evangelicals in the second direction. It might even help cool their social-issue fervor.

I’m especially inclined to see this as a real possibility after my very interesting and enjoyable recent visit to Covenant College, in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, just across the Tennessee border from Chattanooga. Covenant is no Bob Jones University—dancing is permitted, the dress code is relaxed, and check out the school Drama Association’s latest production!—but it is a stronghold of evangelical Christianity. (Motto: “In All Things Christ Pre-Eminent”.) Judging from a show of hands I asked for, the people who came to my talk all pretty much unanimously believe in a personal God who has opinions about which human sexual practices are naughty, and which are nice. Be that as it may, I liked them all—students, faculty, and the college president, Niel Nielson—very much. They were polite, serious, gracious, and un-self-righteous. I don’t know how typical the students I talked with were, but they were eager to discuss every question from “Is there a God?” to “At what point does the moral value of a human fetus exceed that of a live chimpanzee?” I got the impression that many of them are embarrassed by the likes of Dobson, Robertson, and Sarah Palin, and have no wish to be lumped in with them. Several volunteered to me that they had voted for Obama. Many more seemed fascinated by him and glad that he views them as citizens of the same country that he is going to be President of. When we discussed gay issues, it seemed clear to me that they were earnestly struggling with the contradiction between, on the one hand, the Bible’s supposed anti-gay fulminations and, on the other hand, their own increasingly inescapable knowledge that (a) being gay is not a “lifestyle choice” and (b) there is no danger of gays “recruiting” straights, let alone recruiting so many that the human race dwindles into nonexistence.

These students live in a bubble, and they know it. But then, people like me live in a bubble, too, and, on the whole, we don’t know it. From my angle, of course, our bubble looks bigger and better. Theirs: a constricted, six-thousand-year-old world ruled by an incorrigibly small-minded God, the secrets of which are to be found in a black-bound anthology of unreliably translated old tribal stories, poems, directives, and tracts. Ours: an unimaginably immense, unimaginably ancient universe ruled by no one, the wonders and beauties of which are continually being revealed to us through our senses and our minds. The more frank and friendly conversation there is between the two bubbles, the better. (Don’t take my word for it— take Melissa Etheridge’s.)

Being the opening act at Obama’s Inauguration will give Warren a boost within the evangelical world, at the expense of the real baddies (or the real worsies). It will have a calming effect on evangelicals. The rest of us—liberals, gays, secularists, unorthodox Jews, non-Christianist Christians—ought to stay calm, too. We can settle for the rest of the ceremony, including Obama’s address and Joseph Lowery’s benediction. To say nothing of the substantive changes the Obama Administration will bring.

In a recent post pointing out that Joseph Smith was lynched even though he wasn’t hanged, I cited the murder of an Ecuadorean immigrant, José Sucuzhañay, who was beaten to death by a mob of racists, and quoted in the headline of a Times editorial about the murder: “A Lynching in Brooklyn.”

Reader Paul Leopold writes:

Surely what makes a murder a lynching is also a matter of intention. Joseph Smith’s murderers apparently regarded their victim as guilty of a capital crime which the courts had failed to punish and which they intended to deal with by executing the criminal themselves. I don’t get the impression that the murder of Sucuzhañay quite fits this pattern. It may have been equally hate-inspired, but did the murderers, like Smith’s murderers, see themselves as correcting a dereliction of the law by performing an act of justice themselves? Surely such a self-conception of the murderers’ motive is part of what ordinary usage requires for calling a murder a lynching.

You’re right, Mr. Leopold. Unlike the shooting of Smith, the “lynching in Brooklyn” was not, strictly speaking (and strictly is the best way to speak), a lynching. It was a hate crime. My mistake, and the Times’s.

I’m not among those who have a problem with the concept of Senator Caroline Kennedy (D-NY).

To harp a bit on the theme of my current Comment, one of the plus sides of getting a senator by appointment is that he or she doesn't have to “earn” it—i.e., doesn't have to spend years begging for money over the phone, doesn't have to establish “roots” in some Podunk locality at the cost of forgoing any understanding of the rest of the world, doesn't have to make nice with local realtors and the like—in short, doesn't have to have organized his or her entire life around the American way of office-seeking. This makes it possible, of course, for an appointed senator to be an absolutely clueless nonentity. But it also makes it possible, at least in theory, for an appointed senator to be interesting in a way that adds some spark or variety to the institution.

I think Caroline would be in the second category. She is intelligent, sophisticated, educated, and public-spirited. Yes, she is somewhat shy. But don’t shy persons deserve representation, too?*

The objection that we don’t know enough about her “positions on the issues” is silly. Her positions will fall in the spectrum defined by her uncle Edward Kennedy on the left and her friend Barack Obama on the right. The objection that she doesn’t have enough “experience” is more reasonable, I guess, but her involvement in and exposure to public affairs has been far from negligible, and other aspects of the package should more than make up for what everybody keeps calling the “thinness of her resume”: her quiet fame, which makes people curious about her and will make them eager to know and please her; the top-flight staff she will have no trouble attracting; the insights she has no doubt acquired from a lifetime of observing and participating in the history of her time from the eye of the Kennedy family hurricane.

I don’t take too seriously the blogosphere brouhaha around the alleged danger of dynastic entitlement. Great political families seem to be indelible features of life in any imperial republic, and the American, like the Roman, has always had its share—Adamses, Harrisons, Roosevelts, Tafts, LaFollettes, Bushes… (oops, bad example). The nepotism of the Kennedys has been especially outrageous, if that sort of thing outrages you. Yet Ted Kennedy, who started out as the family meathead, blossomed into one of the greatest legislators in the history of the Senate. The odds are that Caroline would do very well there. And, for sure, I’m curious to find out.

——————

*Incidentally, Garrison Keillor would be the perfect senatorial colleague for Al Franken in the Minnesota delegation.

The nineteen-fifties are usually thought of as an age of bland conformity, but an awful lot of subversive cultural lava was bubbling under the surface. If you were a teen-age or precociously preteen misfit, especially if you were growing up somewhere within 50,000 watts of New York City, your points of light amid the Eisenhowerish murk might have included Ernie Kovacs, Roger Price, Harvey Kurtzman (of, successively, Mad comics, Mad magazine, Trump, Humbug, and Help!), Al “Jazzbo” Collins, Mort Sahl, Lord Buckley, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, and the mostly wordless alternative universe of bop: Parker, Davis, Monk, Coltrane, Silver, Blakey… The full list would be three or four times longer; these are just a few names off the top of my head.

One of those misfit teens was Donald Fagen, who, with and without his Steely Dan collaborator Walter Becker, has been among the subtlest commentators on the many zeitgeists of the past five decades (as well as being among the most alchemically skilled metallurgists of the era’s musics); one of those lava streams flowed from the mind and voice of Jean Shepherd, the great radio storyteller. At Slate, Fagen gives Shepherd his due, in three dimensions.

1.

Oliver Sacks has a beautiful essay in the November 20th New York Review of Books, on Charles Darwin as a botanist. It is not only scientifically absorbing (as is everything Sacks writes) and humanly alive (ditto) but also spiritually uplifting—it demonstrates why “unbeliever” is such a paltry, ass-backwards label for someone who, while doubting the “supernatural,” embraces the natural. Unfortunately, it’s behind a subscriber wall at the N.Y.R.B. Web site, but even if you’re not a subscriber you can read it there for three bucks. That’s one-fourth the price of a bad movie for an experience at least as satisfying as a good one.

2.

I’ve had a spate of e-mails telling me that, in my Comment on the California anti-gay-marriage initiative, I was wrong to say that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was “lynched.” Rather, they point out, he was shot and killed.

These e-mailers are under the impression that hanging is intrinsic to lynching. Not so. My desk dictionary (the American Heritage College one) defines “lynch” as “To execute without due process of law, esp. to hang, as by a mob.” In other words, while lynching always involves extrajudicial execution by a mob, it only sometimes involves hanging.

In 1844, in Carthage, Illinois, Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum, and three other top Mormons were pumped full of bullets by members of a mob that stormed the jail where they were being held on suspicion of treason against the state of Illinois. Last weekend, in Brooklyn, a gang of bigots shouting anti-gay and anti-Latino epithets murdered an Ecuadorean immigrant, José Sucuzhañay. Yesterday, in the Times, an editorial deploring the murder was headlined “A Lynching in Brooklyn.” Sucuzhañay was beaten to death. His murder, like the murders of Joseph Smith and his colleagues, was “a savage, hate-inspired crime.” And, yes, both were lynchings.

3.

Finally, for you hardcore Bill-ologists out there: the wooden stake, with Keith Olbermann wielding the hammer:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

—From “Countdown,” December 9. The “me” stuff is at 1:50.

When I opined the other day that mandating smaller class sizes as a national goal would be the best available educational reform—better, specifically, than trying to figure out which teachers are good or bad—I had no idea that, elsewhere in the building, Malcolm Gladwell was putting the finishing touches on a piece that says exactly the opposite.

As usual with a Gladwell piece, it’s delightful. It didn’t convince me that I was wrong (though it did give me pause), because the remedies it implicitly proposes are complicated and labor-intensive compared to just counting heads. But, also par for the Gladwell course, it taught me some things I had no idea I was going to learn when I started reading—in this case, things about the differences between professional and college football and the qualities each demands of quarterbacks. Who knew?

Malcolm is a marvel. It’s no accident that he swims in a golden lake bigger than Uncle Scrooge’s, while the rest of us fear to open our 401(k) envelopes. He notices head-spinning connections invisible to us non-Malcolms, leads us deep into the surprising minutiae of other people’s jobs, and gives us new ways of thinking about familiar phenomena. So what if whatever startling thesis he happens to be advancing doesn’t always apply to every situation? Isn’t it enough that he provokes thought and gives pleasure?

Not long ago I found myself at lunch with a bunch of students at Covenant College, an evangelical Christian seat of learning high atop Lookout Mountain, Georgia. These aren’t necessarily the most worldly kids on the planet, or the most liberal, but they know their Gladwell. Three or four of them were already reading “Outliers,” his latest No. 1 bestseller, and the rest were aware of its main point—that without a lot of luck, and without the right sociopolitical conditions, individual talent and hard work do not guarantee success. This led to a discussion of why the kinds of changes advocated by the incoming Administration (and opposed by the outgoing one) might not be so terrible after all.

And of course they knew all about “The Tipping Point” and “Blink.” As do we all.

Since 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment took the selection of senatorism out of the hands of the state legislatures, gave it to the voters, and allowed governors to fill unexpected vacancies, a hundred and eighty senators have attained their seats by appointment. As I suggest in this week’s Comment, most of them have been even less remarkable than their elected colleagues.

But a few have been of interest. Some appointees (Arthur Vandenberg, of Michigan; Sam Ervin, of North Carolina; William Knowland, of California; Walter Mondale, of Minnesota; Howard Metzenbaum, of Ohio; George Mitchell, of Maine) achieved distinction in the Senate; others (James O. Eastland, of Mississippi, and the two Harry Byrds, Sr. and Jr., of Virginia) just made themselves notorious. John Foster Dulles, the future Cold War Secretary of State, and Pierre Salinger, J.F.K.’s bouncy press secretary, flitted briefly through the Capitol as senators by appointment. (The voters quickly showed them the door.)

At least two—Frank Graham, of North Carolina, and Harris Wofford, of Pennsylvania, both former college presidents—were genuine creative intellectuals. Graham, a heroic specimen of that admiral breed, the southern white liberal, was appointed in 1949. He was defeated almost two years later by a filthy, racist campaign engineered by the youthful Jesse Helms, but his protégé—Allard Lowenstein most prominent among them—changed American politics. Harris Wofford may still be best known as the man who not only arranged Martin Luther King’s trip to India to study Gandhian methods but also persuaded J.F.K. to call the imprisoned King on the eve of the 1960 election, thereby clinching Kennedy’s hairbreadth win. In 1991, Governor Bob Casey appointed him to the Senate. Running in his own right later that same year on a platform of healthcare for all, he handily upset Richard Thornburgh, a popular ex-governor. Three years later, he lost narrowly to the egregious Rick Santorum (who, poetically, was routed, in 2006, by Casey’s son, Bob, Jr.). But that didn’t stop Wofford from running and saving Americorps during and after the Clinton Administration. Still going strong at eighty-two, he campaigned tirelessly for Obama.

On the other hand there was Senator Rebecca Felton. In 1922, Thomas Hardwick, the governor of Georgia, hoping to ingratiate himself with newly enfranchised women voters (he was in the doghouse for having opposed the Nineteenth Amendment), made gimmicky history by appointing a woman, the first ever, to the world’s supposedly most exclusive club. Mrs. Felton, an eighty-seven-year-old suffragist and prohibitionist, spent one day in the job before being displaced by an elected successor. If she is not remembered today as a feminist heroine, perhaps it has something to do with her bloodcurdling enthusiasm for murder as the surest remedy for interracial relationships of the sort that gave us our soon-to-be President. As she said on August 11, 1897, “When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue—if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts—then I say lynch a thousand a week.”

I guess she’d have been a PUMA.

Michael Calderone’s blog at Politico brings a waiting public the latest news:

Gingrich on Hertzberg: ‘a total jerk’

Last Thursday on “The O’Reilly Factor,” comments made by Newt Gingrich a month earlier on the show, fueled a battle between host Bill O’Reilly and New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg, who’d penned a column referencing them. (Hertzberg wrote about it on his New Yorker blog last week).

Politico’s Daniel Libit caught up with the former House Speaker, for his thoughts on the cable news controversy:

I thought that was funny. I thought the fact that O’Reilly played unedited the entire walking interview with Hertzberg—who is a total jerk—was just funny. If you go back and look at what I said, it was a very narrowly focused reference to people who were invading churches and in one case surrounding a 65-year-old person and harassing her about wearing a cross. Now, in my judgment, people who do that are fascists. And whether they are fascists on the right or fascists on the left, they’re fascists, because they believe in imposing their views on you, outside the law, or they believe in using the law to force you to change who you are. And I’m opposed to fascism of any kind.

Not to be overly picky, but it is not true that “O’Reilly played unedited the entire walking interview with Hertzberg.” The “interview” lasted long enough to yield somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes of footage. This was edited down to a non-continuous one minute and twenty-six seconds.

As to whether the former Speaker’s reference to “a gay and secular fascism” that “is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it” was “very narrowly focussed,” that’s not true, either—though this, of course, is a matter of judgment as distinct from absolutely verifiable fact.

I’d always been a fan of the nice, rational, calm Canadian political system, but is it really true that all of a sudden the way they decide who’s going to be Prime Minister is to place a call to the local viceroy representing Queen Elizabeth II?

It would appear so.

The following is only for those who have an obsessive interest in petty squabbles between Fox News hosts and New Yorker scribblers. Consider yourself warned.

My first inkling of my week as a Bill O’Reilly guest star came on Tuesday morning, December 2nd, as I was leaving home to go to work. I hadn’t had my coffee yet. I hadn’t even checked my e-mail. I was not at my most intellectually acute.

Two youngish guys dressed in slacker clothes—one with a microphone, the other with a camera—accosted me on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. The guy with the microphone stuck it in my face and started badgering me with questions about why I had called Newt Gingrich a bigot. The guy didn’t say who he was or whom he represented, and his mike didn’t have one of those identifying doohickeys on it, so it took me a minute or two to figure out what was going on. It helped when he mentioned O’Reilly—that conjured up a vague memory of seeing something similar on “The O’Reilly Factor.” (Maybe when the “ambushee” was Bill Moyers?)

At that point, I suppose, I should have just given the guy my business card and suggested that if Mr. O’Reilly wanted to interview me, he should have someone get in touch with me at the office. But, as I say, no coffee yet. Also, I have a weakness for street weirdos.

So I talked to the guy for, I don’t know, five or ten minutes. Then, on my way to the subway, I turned on my BlackBerry. There was a note from Matt Cooper, of Condé Nast Portfolio:

As a devoted Fox viewer, I probably don’t need to tell you, but Bill O’Reilly was on your case last night, complete with putting up a picture of you on the screen. Hope all’s well.

When I got to the office, our P.R. person, Alexa Cassanos, showed me the video clip from the night before. Unfortunately it’s neither embeddable nor linkable—Alexa got it from some special service she subscribes to—but it is describable.

It’s on the “Reality Check” segment, sandwiched between attacks on the Times and Al Franken. O’Reilly says:

Next to the New York Times, The New Yorker magazine is perhaps the most politically correct publication in the mainstream media. And one of their columnists, Hendrik Hertzberg, is a flat-out deceiver.

On the screen: this picture of me.

I’d never seen it before. It must have been taken after I bruised my jaw body-surfing a couple of summers ago and couldn’t shave for a few weeks. Then the screen changes to a text box—

—and O’Reilly continues, reading the quote:

Writing about gay marriage and the vote in California Hertzberg says, quote, “Like a polluted swamp, anti-gay bigotry is likely to get thicker and more toxic as it dries up…. Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, said the other day (on the air, to Bill O’Reilly), “I think are is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us….”

Now just O’Reilly’s face on the screen:

What Hertzberg did not tell New Yorker readers is that that conversation with Speaker Gingrich was about gay violence against a Christian missionary in San Francisco. It had nothing to do with the gay marriage vote, only militant reaction to it. Hertzberg does this kind of dishonest stuff all the time, because he knows many of his readers never watch “The Factor” and Gingrich and I are easy targets for his distortions. Hertzberg owes Newt Gingrich a written apology for taking his remarks completely out of context. And The New Yorker magazine should be ashamed to publish a dishonest guy like this.

End of segment.

After modestly accepting congratulations from several colleagues (and some ribbing from David Remnick, our editor), I went to my office as usual.

The next day, Wednesday, Remnick got an e-mail from one of O’Reilly’s producers, Ron Mitchell. Can you bear to read the whole thing?

I have contacted Alexa Cassanos about this, but also wanted to send this directly to you.

Bill O’Reilly has taken issue with certain statements that appeared in Mr. Hertzberg’s piece from your December 1st issue.

Mr. Hertzberg, who recounts a recent installment of The O’Reilly Factor, has accused former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of being an anti-gay “bigot” while ignoring the context of the conversation between Speaker Gingrich and Mr. O’Reilly. It seems unlikely that Mr. Hertzberg actually saw the show, but relied upon 2nd hand accounts of that conversation.

I have included a timeline and transcript of what happened. It is clear that Speaker Gingrich is referring to several well-publicized accounts of gay marriage proponents engaged in activities such as storming a church in Michigan and assaulting a Christian group in San Francisco. He is not referring to an entire group of people.

We believe that Mr. Hertzberg owes Speaker Gingrich an apology and are asking for a statement from you on this matter. I am sure that you will agree that a serious allegation like this deserves your immediate attention.

We’re still in Mitchell’s e-mail. There’s more—his “timeline and transcript”:

1-On the November 14 edition of The O’Reilly Factor, the following exchange happened between O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich:

O’REILLY: .he didn’t have the power that she has. And he didn’t have a husband or a wife like he does.

OK, now the culture war, I know you’ve been flying around the country and doing stuff. In the last three or four days, really nasty stuff. I mean, you know, hyper. We’re going to show you some of the video. A woman getting a cross smashed out of her hand. We had a church in Michigan invaded by gay activists. We’re going to show you the video on Monday of that. We have exclusively. We had a guy in Sacramento fired from his job. We have boycotts called on restaurants. I mean, it is getting out of control very few days after the election. How do you assess that?

GINGRICH: Look, I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants impose its will on the rest of us. It is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government, if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact, and frankly for that matter if you believe in the historic version of Islam or the historic version of Judaism, you have to confront the reality that the secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they’re the opposite of what you’re taught in Sunday school.

2-On November 17, MediaMatters.org posted the following headline and summary:

Gingrich: “[T]here is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us” Summary: Discussing actions by individual protesters of Proposition 8, Newt Gingrich stated: “I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion.”

3-In the December 1 issue of The New Yorker, Hendrick Hertzberg wrote this in his piece (p.27):

Like a polluted swamp, anti-gay bigotry is likely to get thicker and more toxic as it dries up. Viciousness meets viscousness. “Look,” Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, said the other day (on the air, to Bill O’Reilly), “I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence… . I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact.” For diversity’s sake, he added that “the historic version of Islam” and “the historic version of Judaism” are likewise menaced—which is natural, given that gay, secular, fascist values are “the opposite of what you’re taught in Sunday school.”

This sort of sludge may or may not prove to be of some slight utility in the 2012 Republican primaries, but it is, increasingly, history.

Ron Mitchell
Senior Producer, The O’Reilly Factor
Fox News Channel

Remnick’s reply, later that day:

Dear Mr. Mitchell,

Thank you for your email. I’ve read your note carefully, and more than once, and, of course, have read Hendrik Hertzberg’s piece again. It’s simple: I stand behind, and with, Mr. Hertzberg; that is, as the editor of the magazine, I have no problem with the piece he wrote. Any other back-and-forth would likely be more productive with him.

Respectfully yours,
David

That evening, the Wednesday, December 3rd, edition of “The O’Reilly Factor” came and went with no video of me and the guy with the microphone. That seemed to be that.

Then, at about half past midnight last night (i.e., shortly after Wednesday became Thursday), I checked my e-mail one last time and found this, sent a couple of hours earlier by someone called Steve:

Subj: Don’t Lie in your editorials Dude!

When the gays and dykes crash into churches to impose their idealogy violently on average americans and destroy signs of opposing views, that’s fascism!!!

Get your facts right before you spout propaganda!!

Gathering from this that O’Reilly had found some usable footage after all, I turned on the TV. Luckily, his program is rebroadcast from midnight to 1 A.M. Sure enough:

In fairness to the O’Reilly video-editing team, I have to say that they probably could have made me look even worse. On the other hand, they could have made me look rather better. F and B.

For what it’s worth, in my original piece for the magazine, I didn’t accuse Gingrich of being a bigot, let alone a “vicious bigot,” as the guy with the mike put it. I think it’s fairly clear that what I did accuse him of was playing to bigotry.

Nor do I think I took Gingrich out of context. In Gingrich’s November 14th interview with O’Reilly, the context is O’Reilly’s mention of two instances of disruptive thuggery, one person being “fired” (the reference is to the artistic director of the California Musical Theatre, who resigned under pressure after colleagues and financial contributors objected to his financial support of the California anti-gay-marriage ballot item), and some boycotts of restaurants. As O’Reilly talks, the screen shows pictures of people protesting peacefully and carrying signs.

The thuggery O’Reilly mentions was contemptible, but the rest of it was just normal democratic protest. (O’Reilly himself frequently asks his viewers to boycott businesses that offend him, such as department stores whose employees wish customers “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”) None of it comes anywhere near “fascism,” let alone some sort of fascist “movement” that could plausibly threaten to take over the government. I don’t think it was at all unreasonable for me to infer that the targets of Mr. Gingrich’s “fascism” remarks were the mainstream gay-rights movement in general and the opponents of Proposition 8 in particular.

One more thing. O’Reilly said last night that I “refused to come on ‘The Factor,’” as he calls his program. This is simply a lie. Neither he nor any of his staff asked me to appear on his program, either directly or through anyone else at The New Yorker. I’m puzzled that O’Reilly said otherwise, since he has to know that we know he was lying. I guess he just doesn’t care. He’s got his base.

* * *

Update: One more exchange between Ron Mitchell, the O’Reilly producer at Fox, and David Remnick, from late this afternoon (Friday, December 5th).

Mitchell to Remnick:

Much has been said about all this over the last few days. I just still want to make sure that you are comfortable with the whole situation. If you think that you have not been treated fairly, please let me know, and we can do something with you on the air.

Remnick to Mitchell:

Dear Mr. Mitchell,

Thanks for your courteous note. It’s an interesting contrast in tone with the the fantastical on-air description of Rick as a left-wing zealot, the nonsense that he had refused a real interview before sending a crew to his apartment building, and the sneering descriptions of Rick, me, and the magazine from Mr O’Reilly on air. Quite a performance. So while I appreciate your note, you’ll forgive me if I pass in wanting to engage this any more. What I said at the start stands: I thought Rick’s piece, considering Newt Gingrich’s language, was, as you might put it, fair and balanced.

Respectfully yours, David Remnick