It's about time for Bill O'Reilly to be a SEDHE Villain of the Forever. Here's a list of things he has done to put himself into such a nefarious group:

• Created a show with the tagline "the no spin zone" even though O'Reilly repeats the Republican talking points, which are themselves "spin"
• Suggested that Cindy Sheehan was not speaking for herself, but rather was a puppet of George Soros and the "hate America" crowd
• Made mistakes of fact and then refused to admit that he made such mistakes
• Sanctimoniously acted as though he were in a position to lecture Americans about morality, then was caught sexually harassing an employee
• Represented himself as a person with some sort of hard news background when in fact his job prior to working at FOX News was as an anchorman for the tabloid show Inside Edition

Well, last week, O'Reilly became incensed after San Franciscans overwhelmingly approved Proposition I, a ballot initiative that would prohibit military recruiters from being given information about public school students in order to recruit them. The city, though, cannot legally enforce such a measure, so the 59% of voters who favored the measure were making a symbolic statement.

On his syndicated radio show, The Radio Factor, O'Reilly had this to say to San Franciscans:

Hey, you know, if you want to ban military recruiting, fine, but I'm not going to give you another nickel of federal money. You know, if I'm the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium, and I say, "Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead."

And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.

O'Reilly later tried to weasel his way out of this statement by suggesting that it was a "satirical riff" and that of course he wasn't really calling for terrorists to blow up Coit Tower. And I have no doubt that if a liberal talk show host had said the same thing, Republicans wouldn't pounce on that person, because Republicans would understand that the statement was meant satirically.

(That last paragraph was a satirical riff, by the way. Republicans would tear the talk show host apart and demand that he or she be fired, crucified, and shot into the sun.)

Military recruiting at public schools is a complex issue, and suggesting that recruiters shouldn't recruit on high school and college campuses does not -- as O'Reilly suggests -- mean that those who oppose such recruiting hate the military or love terrorists. I wonder if O'Reilly has even read the measure and understands what it means. Taking things wildly out of context would just be par for the course for him.

According to the text of Proposition I, the measure opposes "U.S. military recruiters using public school, college and university facilities to recruit young people into the armed forces" and suggests that the city provide college scholarships to underprivileged students so that they don't have to join the military in order to pay for college or earn money (what the measure calls an "economic draft").

Interestingly, the measure also mentions that the No Child Left Behind Act, in addition to leaving children behind, compels public schools to provide personal records of children in those schools to the military for recruiting purposes. Prior to No Child Left Behind, a piece of legislation called the Federal Educational Records Protection Act Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act made it a federal crime to disclose student records denied federal funding to schools that provided personal student information to anyone other than the student and the student's parents. But since we're living in a militaristic society, it's okay to violate FERPA make stupid exceptions for the purpose of sending more bags of meat to die in a pointless war. (And by the way, George Bush, Democrats did not receive the same intelligence you did prior to the war. They received only the intelligence that you elected to show them!)

Perhaps O'Reilly is unaware of a court case called Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (04-1152). Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR) is a coalition of over 30 law schools and faculties. In 1997, Congress added to an omnibus spending bill and the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill of 1997 an amendment called the Solomon amendment. The amendment allows the Secretary of Defense to deny federal funding to colleges and universities that prohibit ROTC or military recruiting on campus.

FAIR protested the amendment, calling it a violation of campus' freedom of expressive association. Forcing college campuses to accept military recruitment would foster the impression that the colleges condoned military recruitment, as well as the policies of the military. Especially at issue are the military's anti-homosexual policies. The colleges' ban on military recruitment was an expressive act protesting the military's ban on gays, says FAIR. The government says the Solomon amendment doesn't impinge upon freedom of speech; colleges are free to dissent by banning military recruitment, but the federal government is also free to deny them federal funding.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals didn't buy the government's argument and sided with FAIR. The court said that the Solomon amendment creates "compelled speech" by forcing students to support the military's stance on gays. This, of course, violates the First Amendment: the government cannot, through some action, compel a particular organization to take a stance on an issue that is counter to what that organization actually believes. (This is the flip side of the same coin that we saw in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 99-699 [2000]). The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Rumsfeld v. FAIR on Dec. 6.

For being the World's Most Colossal Jerk, Bill O'Reilly is a SEDHE Villain of the Forever.

UPDATE: § 9528 of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires public schools to "provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students names, addresses, and telephone listings." This is not in violation of FERPA, as FERPA allows schools to release such "directory information" (as defined by 20 U.S.C. 1232g(a)(5)(A)) without the consent of the parent or student.