J.C. Penny hired Ellen Degeneres as a celebrity spokesperson.
A group called One Million Dumbass Moms [1MDM] (or something like it- I don’t think they have the dumbass but it was surely an unintentional omission) sent a letter demanding Degeneres be fired and pledging to boycott until this is done.
Ellen Degeneres respondedon her own show with an excellent and polite and gentle- and effective- Fuck y’all, biatches! ever done (without ever actually saying fuck, y’all, or biatches, though I’m sure she thought them all). She seems such a genuinely kind person that I think it does almost more to show the ridiculousness of 1MDM than 1MDM’s director Sandy Rios with her machine gun patter and surgically achieved skydiving face, as evidenced on…
Bill O’Reilly, who, in a strange bedfellows twist, took her to task on his show for her decision. While Ellen’s gentle smackdown was exemplary, only people who already agree with her statement are likely to see it and agree with it, sad but true. O’Reilly’s was neither as gentle nor as well delivered, and in fact Bill left himself undefended in a couple of places that if Rios weren’t an idiot she’d have seen clearly and attacked, but being a dumbass she didn’t and didn’t, BUT it was still probably the more useful and helpful of the responses because O’Reilly’s core audience is the one most needing to see somebody that (for whatever reason) they respect tell a homophobic she-bigot that she’s being unAmerican (even if, as mentioned, his argument had some leaks- but luckily between his egomania and experience interviewing inarticulate morons he went full steam ahead with it).
So, huzzah Bill O’Reilly, and well done.
In respect and fairness, this isn’t the first time O’Reilly has broken ranks on a gay issue. He’s never been an aggressive homophobe like a lot of right wing pundits. While he doesn’t generally march in Gay Pride parades or routinely have “Gays-Why I Love 'Em” moments on his show, he has said before he has no problem with gay marriage being legal and that he believes sexual orientation has as much right to be on employment and other non-discrimination criteria as race/gender/religion/etc. have. (How much he’s in favor of non-discrimination is a longer subject.)
That’s a graceful, gentle and poised person right there.
I’m of course talking about Ellen and not O’Reilly, but I agree Bill’s been pretty forceful and consistent about bucking conservative assumptions when he thinks they’re wrong.
It’s funny; I watched Bill O’Reilly back in high school when I was more conservative, then lost interest in him after I became more liberal in college, and afterwards, though I became more conservative on certain issues again, I still thought he was a tool, especially after his embarrasing sex scandal. But then came the Tea Party, and now all of a sudden O’Reilly looks like a downright rational and respectable conservative compared to the goons who dominate the movement now.
Nitpick: Sandy Rios is not affiliated with 1MDM, although she was defending them. At the beginning O’Reilly said he couldn’t get any one of the million moms to go on his show, so this Rios person was brought in as a “Fox contributor”. She is also affiliated with some similar “family values” organization.
Anyway, good on JC Penney, mainly, for having the common sense to know up front that hiring Ellen as a spokesperson was liable to have some backlash, and to be prepared to stick up for their decision.
Roddy
It sounds like One Million Morons is trying to get some kind of attention to themselves. Attacking Ellen, who is one of the most, if not THE, most liked people on TV, is bound to be fruitless. Who do they think shops at Penneys? Who do they think fills the seats at Ellen’s TV tapings? Bible bangers? Perverts? …Well, how about average Americans full o’ family values??..I notice Penneys has nice TV commercials now and an attractive ad insert in the newspaper, reforming their image. Yay, Penneys! Imma doing my Valentines Day present shopping there, to encourage them.
I’m not sure his argument really had any leaks, did it? He and Rios seemed to be arguing across each other.
O’Reilly’s point appears to be simply that the so-called “Million Moms” simply aren’t acting in a decent or, as O"Reilly puts it, “American” manner. He’s not arguing that they have no right to demand DeGeneres be fired; he is arguing, rather, that it’s just unseeming and hostile to turn a business decision into a personal matter based on something that isn’t, in his estimation, pertinent to the business arrangement. He goes on to express specific concern in the idea of demanding someone be fired from a job by mixing personal and business matters. He phrases his point very simply: “I don’t think that’s correct.” Indeed, at 4:15 he quite specifically separates the two concepts, when Rios claims people demand he be fired; he says “They have a right, but they’re wrong to do it.”
That’s purely his opinion in terms of what is or isn’t polite and essentially right or wrong. You can’t really argue that his personal decision on the politeness of the boycott has a “hole” in it. He just thinks it’s really mean.
Now, you could probably say his comparison to McCarthyism is ill chosen, in that there is a difference between a government doing this and a private organization, but for what he’s trying to say I think his point remains the same; he’s inveighing against the essential nosiness and nastiness of the act, not the legality.
What I love about the 1MDM demand is that If for some reason J.C. Penney’s wilhelmed in fear of them and totally capitulated by firing Ellen, then the result would be that Ellen gets paid millions of dollars and doesn’t even have to sing and dance for Penneys. This isn’t like telling a $7.50/per hour new hire “sorry, we really have to let you go”, this is somebody with a contract who, unless she goes on a killing spree or gets caught driving a 20 foot UHaul full of illegal Haitians and cocaine across the border, is gonna get paid, and thanks to 1MDM she’d now be able to lesbianate to her heart’s content with a lot more money and a lot more free time.
OTOH, if the objective of 1MDM is for gay people to get paid truckloads of money for doing nothing then I’d love to join.
My apologies for the Sandy Rios goof, but really, who the hell ever heard of a “watchdog” group where the members were too cowardly to give their names?
I note on their website they claim credit for the cancellation of NBC’s The Playboy Club as well. For some reason I’d assumed that the show’s first episode being a complete and unqualified critical and ratings bomb, very expensive to produce due to a large cast/period setting, and managed to get many fewer viewers each week had something to do with its cancellation, but apparently it was an anonymous snarkboard. (Apparently the producers of GLEE haven’t checked their voicemail.)
Here’s the thing. There probably aren’t a million of them, and they probably aren’t all “moms”. They are a bunch of bigots trying to get attention so they can start a Pac and collect money and pay themselves a nice salary.
I loved it when Ellen promoted that one series of US stamps, the “Adopt a Shelter Pet” series. I guess her own dog is from a shelter. I bought and used those stamps until they stopped printing them. My own dachshund, Nathan, is a shelter dog.
You have to admit, while correct this time, O’Reilly’s argument was no rhetorical masterpiece. He would have gotten chewed up if that bigot had anything more than a twitching ganglia in her mop head, or had done a second of preparation.
“I love you, Bill” she came in thinking this was going to be some gentle echo chamber xenophobefest, it’s FOX News, who could blame her. Imagine her surprise when she discovers shes publicly confronted by someone she can’t dismiss as a liberal activist socialist god hating muslim lover.
This didn’t trip over an ideological line in the sand. This wasn’t an example of his integrity. He felt like shouting down a stupid person. Thats all this was.
Wasn’t it a quote of his that inspired the Garfunkel & Oates song “Sex with Ducks”?
Maybe I’m misremembering, or maybe it’s an isolated video clip taken out of context, but I think there’s video of Bill O’Reilly saying if gays can get married, why couldn’t you marry a duck?
