More O'Ridiculousness

O'Reilly talking to Eric Burns about how the liberal media hates Bush & sides with... well, people O'Reilly dislikes.

This was great, though.

O'Schmuckface: You can bet that back in colonial times, the media wouldn't have had these kind of issues about church and state.
Burns: Well, no, it used to be a lot different. People had a difficult attitude about church...
O'Moron: And you can bet that they wouldn't dare sympathize with child rapists!

O'Reilly seems to have conveniently forgotten a couple of things. First, while apparently the Pilgrims and Puritans didn't marry their kids off that early, the Southern colonies DID.

For ladies living in the South during this period, they could marry as young as fourteen.

As the site goes on to explain, this was at least partially because the average lifespan at the time was a fraction of what it was today. (Incidentally, the Friar's illustrious ancestry contains several incidents of early marriages, as well, including one bizarre birth record that suggests, while not stating outright, that the mother of the child in question was only NINE years older than the son. It's not just a Christian thing.)

Let's also not forget that other odious things were tolerated at the time, such as slavery, as well as the rape of slaves, children and otherwise. Jefferson, anybody? Helloooo?

BTW, as some may have guessed, O'Jackass is also drastically oversimplifying early America's relationship with organized religion. From Richard Shenkman's I Love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode or Not:

“As for the beliefs of the founding fathers, the remarkable thing is not that so many believed in Christianity, but that so many expressed doubt about it... Ben Franklin never believed in the divinity of Christ and as a young man he toyed with polytheism... as an old man John Adams became fascinated with paganism... Thomas Jefferson believed in God and considered himself a Christian, but he seemed to reject the divinity of Christ and considered Calvin's sermons blasphemous. Alexander Hamilton, both at the beginning of his life and near the end, expressed faith in Christianity, but during the revolutionary period he was utterly indifferent to it... Thomas Paine condemned the "monstrous belief" that God had ever spoken to man. George Washington, though he belonged to the Episcopal church, never mentioned Christ in any of his writings and he was a deist.

Certainly the founders weren't hostile either to religion or the clergy... but neither did they insist, one and all, that religion was a pillar of liberty. Indeed, many of the most illustrious founders plainly rejected the idea. Historian John Diggins says those involved in writing and defeding the Constitution, men like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, "expressed profound ambivalence about religion, often seeing it as divisive rather than cohesive." And some of those who later came to believe in the necessity of religion, such as Adams, originally thought religiosity was of little matter.

... The founders have been pressed into the service of religion so long now and with such force that it is almost impossible to recover what they really thought. But we can certainly reconstruct their actions... Consider the practice of public prayers [such as] opening meetings of Congress with a prayer... we do more of it than they ever did (not because they opposed praying but because they thought politics and praying didn't mix). The Constitutional Convention opened without a single prayer and several of the first presidents, including both Jefferson and Madison, generally refused to issue prayers, despite importunings that they do so. Under pressure, Madison relented in the War of 1812, but held to his belief that chaplains shouldn't be appointed to the military or be allowed to open Congress."

Luckily, Dr. Bill doesn't let pesky things like facts get in his way. It might make it harder to say stupid things.