Would you defend Bill O'Reilly if he did the same thing in reverse?
If O'Reilly was doing the exact same type of show he always does without any tricks and someone mischaracterized it as an "ambush"? Absolutely.
The onus is on the guest to be prepared for the show. If you have a bad appearance not because of any trickery but just because you're not prepared to handle what they do every episode, that's you're fault. No one is being held at gunpoint and being forced to go on these shows.
That being said, a lack of preparedness was not the problem here.
If he invited three people who are against gay marriage to debate against a pro gay marriage person who was not particularly good at debate?
How about you quit making excuses for he guy? The problem isn't that he's not a good debater, it's that the anti-gay marriage debate isn't good. There's no leg to stand on there.
Rev. Michel Faulkner has a B.A. in communications and a Master's in education & career counseling from Virginia Tech. He played football for Virginia Tech and the NY Jets, and went on to become an assistant dean of students and then vice president of Liberty University, so he's been acquainted with dealing with the press for years. He's been a pastor in NYC speaking before hundreds of people since 1988. He's a published author. He's been part of multiple NYC government task forces relating to community relations, HIV/AIDS, and charter schools. He's started his own non-profit. He was the 2010 Republican nominee for New York's 15th congressional district.
http://www.institute4leadership.com/rev-michel-faulkner.html
His job is literally public speaking, debating, composing speeches to support his beliefs, and dealing with the media. He's not some bumpkin they pulled in off the street to blindside.
Fox News likes to do things like find a guy who's taking advantage of welfare so he can freeload and use that one guy as a representative of all people who are on welfare. Would you defend Bill O'Reilly if he brought in that one guy to debate welfare against three economics professors?
Except that has no relation to what actually happened. Faulkner is among the best representatives of his particular viewpoint in terms of skill and knowledge, not the worst. He's got no personal issues to exploit as a "gotcha," and nothing like that happened in the show. He was also the most qualified and educated debater on the panel with the possible exception of the reporter, who might be his equal, but didn't get much time to speak. Or are you saying the comedian and the boy band singer were the "economics professors" to his "welfare recipient" in that scenario?
The fallacy you keep pushing is that there actually is a good argument in favor of opposing same-sex marriage if only they'd find the right person to represent the argument. But there's not, because it always comes down to an irrational personal bias rather than any kind of sound legal standing or reasoned philosophical stance, as I laid out in the previous post.
By all means, present the reasonable defense of opposing same-sex marriage that relies on scriptural tradition without acknowledging that we all break with scriptural tradition every day in hundreds, if not thousands of ways. Present the argument that relies on freedom of religion without acknowledging the equal protection from religion. Present the argument for the sanctity of marriage without acknowledging how this affects anyone else's marriage or how we treat marriage as sanctified given the divorce rate.
Is it okay only because you agree with the position? If Bill O'Reilly ran basically the exact same show only he argued for a liberal point of view, would you sing his praises?
Already answered up top. This isn't a left/right issue, because it's not a debate about same-sex marriage. It's a debate whether Wilmore's handling of the panel was fair or whether it was an "ambush" against an ill-prepared target. Despite repeating your point ad nauseam, you've offered nothing in support of your argument.
- The format was the same as all prior Nightly Show episodes, so no surprise or ambush.
- The debater was more than qualified to handle himself, so not a weak panelist.
- The numerical breakdown of the panel was representative of the percentages of states (and the national populace) where same-sex marriage is legal.
I don't think his response to that question revealed hypocrisy at all. He was put in a position where answering 'Yes' would trivialize his position as slavish devotion to text and answering 'No' would trivialize his position as having nothing to do with his religious beliefs, so he denied the premise of the question
Asking "if God personally told you he was fine with gay marriage, would you change your position" trivializes his position? His stance is literally based on following the alleged word of God, and yet when presented with a hypothetical scenario where the word of God tells him it's okay, he would still find a way to oppose same-sex marriage based on prior scripture. That's the definition of hypocrisy.
Larry gave a Keep It 100 sticker to an obese woman who claimed she wouldn't prefer to be thin and not to a man who questioned the idea that the God he believed in would suddenly reverse his position. You don't think his personal preference for the position they hold played a factor there?
The question wasn't do you think it's plausible that God might change his position, the question was what would you do if he did. It's not a difficult or confusing question. If you believe you're adhering to the word of God and the word of God tells you to change your stance, there's no shame in changing your stance, and by the rules of your religion you are obligated to do so. He was essentially saying he would be a heretic if God's commandment superseded his own personal feelings about same-sex marriage.
Larry wasn't even expecting him to come out with the whole truth and flat out say that his stance is only about his personal distaste with gay marriage rather than scripture. That would have been unfair. The question he asked was rather easy by comparison, and takes nothing away from his stance by answering honestly.
