If it makes Bill feel better, Rowling’s secret plan probably won’t work. As Air America’s Rachel Maddow points out about five minutes into the clip, “If the presence of a secretly gay character was enough to brainwash people into liking the gays, think about how different the U.S. Senate would be.”

MARRIAGE

Unlike many of his buddies at Fox, O’Reilly approves, in a general way, of quiet, behind-closed-doors same-sex partnerships – emphasis on the “quiet.” And you’ll be relieved to know that, while he does like a good slippery slope argument, he (usually) rejects the idea that recognizing the legality of gay marriage will lead inevitably to man/dog weddings.

Still, he’s adamantly and passionately opposed to same-sex marriage and any legal recognition that goes much beyond hospital visitation rights.

Michelangelo Signorile on the O’Reilly Factor

Out gay political commentator Michelangelo Signorile went on Fox earlier this year to debate same-sex marriage with O’Reilly, and managed to score some points while still getting pulled into a few of O’Reilly’s verbal traps. It’s not that O’Reilly’s traps are especially clever. It’s more, as Stephen Colbert once said, that people are always ready to criticize O’Reilly for what he says, but “never give you credit for how loud you say it, or how long.” At a certain point, Signorile fell back to get his breath, letting Bill spew for a while about polygamy, followed by a long dissertation on activist courts and letting the people decide.

After Signorile got his second wind, he reminded O’Reilly that in 1969, 90 percent of people were opposed to interracial marriage. “You don't bring a civil rights issue to the ballot,” he said sternly.

Bill fell back on the polygamy rant, and Signorile rolled his eyes. “It's a desperation move. They go to polygamy, then bestiality. Someone's gonna want to marry their dog.”

“Nah,” answered Bill. “Bestiality's a public health thing.”

Those Darn Scandinavians

Slippery slope polygamy is apparently the only thing Bill’s got going for him in his argument against gay marriage. Well, that and the stuff that isn't true.

“Correct me if I’m wrong” about gay marriage, he tells his guests, William N. Eskridge Jr. and Darren R. Spedale, authors of Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We've Learned from the Evidence.

And Professor Eskridge does. In response to O’Reilly’s cataloguing of the harm done to marriage and the family in Scandinavia since same-sex unions received legal recognition, he said, “No. I think that's not true. I think exactly we saw the opposite. And that's why these statistics are so interesting. In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, in each of those countries, after they passed their gay marriage type laws, their registered partnership laws, the rates of heterosexual marriage went up per capita. The rates of heterosexual divorce went down.”

Bill didn’t like that too much, so he ignored it, repeating his version of the professors’ research to a guest just a few minutes later on the same show.