This compels a certain bewilderment:
1. If he is correct that abortion was a crime in colonial times (I love it when things rhyme), then no, abortion was likely not a liberty the Founders intended to protect, BUT...
2. ...if the fellow, Hugh Garber, who sent the email ("a fetus is a human being with potential") is expressing merely his "belief," how does it follow that O'Reilly's assertion - "a fetus is a potential human being" - is "absolutely" a fact and not also a belief? My question follows naturally from...
3. ...O'Reilly's further assertion that until Mr. Garber finds himself appointed to the Supreme Court, his belief remains only that. Once he's on the Supreme Court, his belief will become fact. But O'Reilly's not on the Supreme Court either. So (again) why is his opinion fact?
4. I didn't know Supreme Court justices could turn opinions into facts. Doesn't this bestow upon them a degree of infallibility a Pope could only dream of?
5. Bill-O says he cannot run his show "based on his religious beliefs," so he presents arguments based on facts. Doesn't this amount to saying that his religious belief (and thus his Church's teaching) about the humanity of the fetus from conception is not factual? Not true, in other words? And wouldn't this be the case as well with the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Transfiguration, and all the other Catholic (and Christian) 'shuns'? And doesn't it further amount to saying that, if it is a fact that a fetus is a potential human being, then in killing it you are not killing a human being. And if this is such an obviously ("absolutely") factual truth, wouldn't it have been equally obvious to the Founders? Just as some of them knew slavery to be a bad thing and left open the door to its future demise, might they not also have left open another door, that the abortion liberty might one day rise? (Flaubert thought that prose should never imitate verse, but he was wrong.)
6. If O'Reilly is against abortion (and I think he tries to be), and the rest of us adopted his argument, wouldn't we lose it from the outset?
7. O'Reilly doesn't like to be hung with political tags, but most people would probably say he leans more conservative than liberal. To which I say: not when it counts.