What if Juan Williams had said this?

Seems folks continue to be up in arms about NPR’s firing of Juan Williams. In some cases, the sense is he was fired for saying what ‘everyone’ thinks. Other folks are upset that he was fired un-nicely, instead of in some nice way. Although, If you’ve ever been fired (I was, once) there really aren’t a lot of nice ways for it to go down. 

My post yesterday, which prompted a few comments from folks, took the position that the guy had an employment contract, he’d had issues in the past, and the company with whom he had a contract had a Code of Ethics which he appeared to have violated. I didn’t get into whether what he said was true or right or wrong, but simply that he should have known better based on his prior experience with NPR over the years, including a shift from anchor to ‘analyst’, NPR’s request that his appearances on Fox do not make reference to his alternate reality on public radio, and the NPR ombudsman's published support of his work but not so much his actions.

There are a couple of things about the whole situation that bug me, and it’s not that Williams got fired. First and foremost was the almost immediate call for pulling public financing for NPR by current and former nitwits of the Republican variety --and by Juan Williams himself. No slowpoke, this guy - nope - immediately starts earning his new $2 million contract with Fox News. 

But here’s the bigger thing that gets me -- what if Williams had said something really scary? What if he had said this, instead: “…when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in clerical collars and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as priests, I get worried. I get nervous.”

After all, Catholic priests molested considerably more children than there were people killed on 9/11. And there are many more priests accused of molestation than there were extremists who attacked us on 9/11.   The ramifications of the priest sex abuse scandal are worldwide, and the scariest thing is that they were (and perhaps still are) hiding in plain sight, under the protection of their collars.  

What kind of outrage would be expressed if someone - anyone - put this kind of opinion out there on Fox News?