Fox has found another subject for its Outrage Overdrive machine: the Reverend Luis Leon’s Easter sermon in front of President Obama, especially the line: "It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling people back, for blacks to be back in the back of the bus, for women to be back in the kitchen, for gays to be in the closet and for immigrants to be on their side of the border."  Last night On the Record it was Ralph Reed, chair of the evangelical-political-action-group-extraordinaire Faith and Freedom Coalition, doing the overdriving, asking why the Reverend had chosen a religious occasion to make a political statement, and why the President hadn't distanced himself from it. (The headline on the foxnews.com transcript asks with its usual hysteria: “Will Pres. Obama condemn pastor for using Easter sermon for 'cheap' attack on 'religious right'?)

Reed was suitably outraged. “You take the most sacred holiday on the Christian calendar, a day where you're really supposed to be conveying the greatest story ever told about the… greatest man who ever lived, his life, his ministry, his death, his crucifixion and then his resurrection, and the fact that people can find forgiveness for their sins through faith in him…And to take that, Greta, and turn it into a platform to score cheap political points and to draw such an ugly character caricature of one's fellow co-religionists – [it’s] really sad.”

Reed added that it was also untrue, since (he said) racial reconciliation is a priority of conservative people of faith, and (he said) evangelical women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had fought to give women the right to vote, and (he said) high-ranking Republicans had scolded Rep. Don Young for using a derogatory racial term.

Should the President make a statement about the sermon? Van Susteren asked. Oh yes, Reed replied – he should distance himself publicly from Rev. Leon’s comments. And Rev. Leon, he added, should apologize for the “inaccuracy” of the remarks and not “use an Easter Sunday sermon as a platform to make cheap political attacks on other Americans.”

Now, are you thinking what I’m thinking, gentle reader? A month ago a certain medical person used a non-political prayer breakfast as a platform to lecture President Obama on political issues. And what happened? Fox News called him a hero, praised him to the skies for “speaking truth to power” and paraded him as a possible Presidential candidate. If Rev. Leon had said, say, “It drives me crazy when the liberal left are always calling for Marxist-style redistribution and destroying our freedoms,” or something like that, he’d be Fox’s Flavor of the Month for April. Gag.