Did Someone Say "Smear Merchant"?

Media Matters, a liberal news analysis operation which seeks to expose conservative untruths and bias on TV and radio programming, has once again demonstrated that Bill O'Reilly has no qualms with spreading blatant falsehoods in an attempt to smear institutions of which he does not approve, in this case the ACLU.

On The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, Bill and his guest Wendy Murphy both alleged that it was the official policy of the ACLU that children as young as 13 have a "constitutional right to have sex with adults" (video here). Citing an amicus brief submitted by the ACLU in a Kansas case involving a 14-year-old boy who was molested by an 18-year-old boy, O'Reilly falsely claimed that the ACLU wrote in their brief of this "constitutional right" adding that "they don't want any laws on the books that make it a crime for a child to be abused by an adult."

In fact, the ACLU's brief argued that the law in question, which imposed much more severe sentences on homosexuals than on heterosexuals for comparable behaviors, violated equal protection. The Kansas Supreme Court agreed with the ACLU's position, stating that

"...adding the phrase 'and are members of the opposite sex' [which created harsher penalties for homosexuals] created a broad, overreaching, and undifferentiated status-based classification which bears no rational relationship to legitimate State interests."

In other words, O'Reilly's claims were completely fabricated and had nothing to do with what the ACLU actually wrote in their brief. In fact, the ACLU has never written in any form of a "constitutional right of a child to have sex with adults".

This example of O'Reilly's extreme bias and unrestrained tendency to lie on the air is even more ironic since he spends so much time decrying the "smearing" and "defamation" of the very entity (Media Matters) which exposed this baseless smear against the ACLU.