Culture warrior and Fox News host Bill O’Reilly sounded the alarms on his show yesterday over the looming threat being posed by secularists towards…the Easter bunny.

O’Reilly, perhaps best known for his annual winter jeremiads on the imminent destruction of Christmas, explained to his audience that “secular progressives” are seeking to destroy such holy biblical figures as grown men in bunny costumes so they can legalize marijuana and allow abortions on demand:

O’REILLY: Secular progressives are running wild with President Obama in the White House. They feel unchained, liberated, and they’re trying to diminish any form of religion. The goal is to marginalize religious opposition to secular programs. For example, in Canada and China a woman can have an abortion for any reason at any time. Secular progressives want that here. But traditional forces in America are in opposition. Therefore in this country, you can’t terminate a baby about to be born without a damn good reason. And if you do abort a late term baby, you could be charged with murder. SPs hate that. In Scandanavia, there are laws that say you cannot criticize minorities and if you do, you could be arrested. Secular progressives want laws like that here. Also the legalization of drugs, well under way in many places, and that is a secular cause. So, if the far left can marginalize Santa and the Easter bunny, of they can tell the children those symbols are obsolete and unnecessary, they then set the stage for a totally secular society in the future.

Forgetting for a minute that religiously-affiliated lawmakers are actually imposingtougher abortion laws around the country, that nobody is pushing for a law to criminalize free speech, and that legalizing drugs is far from a secular progressive cause, there is simply no “war on Easter.” O’Reilly points to a handful of small community centers and elementary schools that are hosting “spring egg hunts,” sometimes with a “spring bunny” emceeing the festivities. Nowhere to be found is the word “Easter,” laments O’Reilly, fearful that the nation’s six year olds will one day forget the religious symbolism of crawling around a grassy schoolyard on all fours searching for chocolate-filled plastic eggs. Each of the schools highlighted by O’Reilly has off the day following Easter Sunday, an opportunity for parents to teach their children about the significance of the holiday and a luxury rarely afforded to the practitioners of any other religion in the country.

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham joined O’Reilly to discuss this latest atrocity, and both agreed that the fault belongs to the nation’s “traditional forces,” who aren’t doing enough, in their estimation, to fight back against the rise of secularism and the persecution of religious Christians. It’s a bold statement coming from two people who have a history of being the chief persecutors towards people of other faiths.

HT: Mediaite