Appearing on Fox News on Wednesday, Daily Caller editor and part-time Fox News co-host Tucker Carlson weighed in on SB 1062, Arizona's much-debated new bill that supporters say will protect religious freedom but opponents call an anti-gay version of Jim Crow. His take was as nuanced and thoughtful as always: He said those who believe a business owner should not be able to refuse service to someone just because they think they're gay are fascists.
"It's pretty simple," Carlson began. "I mean, if you want to have a gay wedding, fine, go ahead. If I don't want to bake you a cake for your gay wedding, that's OK too. Or should be. That's called tolerance. But when you try and force me to bake a cake for your gay wedding and threaten me with prison if I don't, that's called fascism." Carlson then went on to argue that no gay people he knows want to see cake refuseniks go to jail, anyway, and asked, "So who are we protecting here?"
Later on during the segment, Fox's longtime house liberal Alan Colmes tried to deconstruct Carlson's logic, asking the right-wing pundit whether he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a bill whose opponents made almost exactly the same arguments as supporters of the Arizona bill make today. Carlson reacted with disgust, claiming that it was a totally illegitimate comparison. "Don't bring [that] into this," Carlson sneered.
"The bottom line," he said to Colmes, "is that you're defending the use of government to crush people who don't want to bake a cake for a gay wedding. I'm just telling you, this has gone too far. Everybody in America is terrified to tell the truth, which is, this is insane, this is not tolerance, this is fascism."
You can watch Carlson declare the true meaning of freedom below, via Media Matters:
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