With such a strong correlation between straight support of our civil rights and knowing a gay friend or family member, O’Reilly’s nostalgia for the closet looks less like the desire to return to a simpler, more innocent age and more like what it is: Second class citizenship.

So what does Bill O’Reilly claim is so objectionable about lesbians and gay men publicly discussing our sexual orientation? Most of the time it has something to do with the children, although he flips back and forth between protecting straight kids from knowing we exist and protecting queer kids from getting bullied and bashed by their homophobic peers.

When it’s not about the kids, it’s about their parents, and the agony they experience in having to explain to little Johnny why Rosie O’Donnell married a girl.

And don’t even get him started on poor Dumbledore.

Bill O’Reilly Doesn’t Want to Hear About It

Bill O’Reilly has a lot in common with Rosie O’Donnell, as he himself has admitted: “We’re both Irish. We’re both from Long Island. And we both like women.”

Pay attention to that last part, because when Bill says it, it’s just information. When Rosie says it? It’s having sex in public.

Back in 2002, O’Reilly appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a day or two after Rosie O’Donnell came out in an interview with Diane Sawyer. Stewart wasn’t at his most feisty that night, but he did interrupt Bill’s rant about how Rosie saying she’s a lesbian amounts to a discussion of her sex life. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to point out O’Reilly’s complete hypocrisy, but only to voice a mild objection that if she hadn’t addressed it, it was going to be addressed for her. He was pretty sure, he said, that Rosie would rather have kept it quiet forever.

We don’t know anything about your private life, O’Reilly pointed out to Stewart – which is true, if you don’t count knowing that he’s married to a woman, how he met his wife, what they did on their first date, and all about the birth of their children (thereby proving they have sex) and what kind of pets they have, all of which Stewart has discussed on his show many times.

O’Reilly also predicted that Ellen DeGeneres, having come out as a lesbian, would “never succeed on television because a large part of America does not want to hear about her sex life.” (Note to Bill: The Ellen DeGeneres Show is one of the most popular daytime programs in TV history, averaging around 3 million viewers a day. The O’Reilly Factor? More like two million and dropping every year.)

The Dumbledore Phenomenon

It’s bad enough when real-life gay people insist on coming out. It’s even worse when an imaginary one does it. Especially when he’s a wizard. And dead.

Almost nothing has ever sent O’Reilly through the roof like J.K. Rowling’s response to a fan’s question about Dumbledore’s romantic past in which she said Harry Potter’s mentor was gay. And while Dumbledore’s outing got a lot of media coverage for someone who doesn’t exist, no one had more fun with O'Reilly's reaction to it than Keith Olbermann.

Since it’s Bill O’Reilly, naturally this was all about the children. And it’s eerily like a trip back in time to the McCarthy era, since O’Reilly seems to think that J.K. Rowling (who is straight) wanted Dumbledore to be gay (even though this fact about him is never mentioned in any of the seven Harry Potter books) in order to indoctrinate children not into homosexuality, but into something he clearly finds even more repugnant: tolerance.

“That's what this Rowling thing is all about,” O’Reilly told guest Dennis Miller, “Because she sells so many books, so many kids read it that she comes out and says, ‘Oh, Dumbledore is gay, and that's great,’ and this, it’s another in the indoctrination thing.”

When Miller demurred and said, “I'll be honest with you, I don't think you can indoctrinate a kid into being gay,” O’Reilly interrupted.

“No, but into tolerance. He’s not going to be gay, but it’s tolerance of it.”