Yeah. The comparison Bill O'Reilley made between gays and al qaeda seems pretty psycho:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_gQFilltDw

Wow, what an O'Reilley kick I'm on today! This video also has the McDonald's gay-al qaeda comparison clip, although at the end it mentions a tea bagger flying an airplane into an IRS building to protest taxes!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fxBoXD2X4w

Any idea if the tea bagging terrorist story has any truth to it? If so, I don't know how I went without hearing about this! That's fucking disturbing.

I found another video earlier today that has an interview with some white supremecists just before the 2008 election, who said they were voting for Obama because they thought it would help spark a white power revolution if people realized how far downhill the country had gone that a black man could be elected President.

I did think it was interesting that he says he doesn't agree with women's-only fitness clubs. Personally, I have no problem with them. From what I understand, they are illegal in most states (including California) but businesses generally just do it anyway and try not to get sued... although sometimes they do get sued.

I think sometimes people tend to support certain opinions just to try to be consistent, when the only real argument for consistency in the law is to keep it simple. But simple laws always tend to be the worst laws in terms of screwing people over due to unforeseen exceptional circumstances. I think both Stossel and O'Reilley are guilty of this on different counts here.

i'm sure businesses would lose money if they decided not to serve a given segment of the population

Nowadays, in most cases that's true. When these laws were passed it was not at all true in many areas... a restaurant that allowed blacks to sit and eat next to the whites in the deep south would have been unpopular and lost a lot of business. They were pressured by societal bigotry to cater either to whites or to blacks, but not both.

Today, the social pressure is a lot more universally towards integration and getting along, than towards segregation and racism. However, this is still not universally true in all towns, so it's worth having the laws around for a while longer until that gets fixed. And while it may be almost entirely true now for restaurants, it's far from true for the housing market or the job market. There's still a lot of pressure towards discrimination there. In the job market, in fact, I think it often pays to stereotype. It's not as fair, but it is faster to look at someone's skin sometimes and make statistical judgements based on it rather than look at their actual ability.

It's the same issue with racial profiling in pulling people over to check for drugs. It may be true that there are more dark skinned crack dealers than light skinned, but that doesn't mean you should inconvenience everyone who happens to have that color skin. They didn't do anything wrong other than be born with that skin color.

I don't see any reason to favor integration over segregation. I am working somewhere where every single person who is in a technical job is either white or asian, and some 80% of service employees (guards, kitchen staff, etc) are black. everyone gets along, so what's the problem?

Everyone "got along" under slavery too. Servants hardly complained, everything must be fine! Easy to say "I don't see any problem with it" if you're in the privileged side of the job market. But how many on the non-privileged side don't think there's a problem?

Yes, integration has always posed challenges for getting along. Many neo-conservatives have accused it of causing race riots and other social problems. Segregation is easier in some ways, but that doesn't mean it's better. Integration was the most difficult when it first started and people weren't used to it. But the payoff to cost ratio is a lot better now that we're through the roughest patch.

The payoff is a society where everyone can enjoy the same freedoms as the dominant races, who have historically had exclusive access to freedom.