Gay Pride Parades Are Still Funny On The O'Reilly Factor

The O'Reilly Factor aired a segment mocking San Francisco's LGBT pride parade, playing on a number of tired and disparaging tropes about gay people.

The July 7 edition of The O'Reilly Factor featured a recurring segment dubbed “Watters' World” during which O'Reilly producer Jesse Watters attended San Francisco's annual LGBT pride parade.  During the segment, Watters interview a number of parade attendees and often paired their comments with sound effects and movie clips meant to poke fun at their responses:

The segment touched on a number of typical right-wing stereotypes about gay people and pride parades; Gay people are promiscuous and predatory (and wear tight pants)! Why are there no straight pride parades? Gay pride parades shove homosexuality down people's throats!

At the end of the segment, Watters assured O'Reilly that none of the parade attendees had “assaulted” him.

Fox Nation picked up the segment, spotlighting one attendee who told Watters she wanted a “gay world”:

This isn't the first time the Factor has used the “Watters' World” segment to mock an LGBT-inclusive parade. Last July, Watters ridiculed Brooklyn's historic Mermaid Parade, opining that gay people “like parades! They're into pageantry, they like to show off their wares.”

The right-wing impulse to use pride parades to ridicule and poke fun at gay people is as old as pride parades themselves. Nowadays, though, the practice of trolling pride parades is typically left to fringe anti-gay activists who still aren't comfortable with the idea of LGBT people being proud in public. And Fox News, apparently.