The Anti-Ellen: Who Is Sandy Rios Anyway?

When Bill O'Reilly defended Ellen DeGeneres this week as spokesperson for JCPenney, he invited Fox News contributor Sandy Rios to argue the other side -- which she not only did with gusto but has also followed up today with a lengthy op-ed explaining why picking DeGeneres will lead to the "the complete eradication of the traditional family."

Rios argues that supporting the lesbian comedian, who is married to another woman, actress Portia de Rossi, means you might as well be supportive of teaching anal fisting to junior-high students. It's like advocating cutting off children's breasts, she says, and it could lead to "closed-door graphic orientations by homosexual students to children as young as fourteen."

Those are some of the things Rios claims are already "happening while America nods in acquiescence." She writes about them in an op-ed posted on a website affiliated with the American Family News Network.

Rios is not only a Fox News contributor since 2005, but she is also vice president of Family-Pac Federal, which raises money to support conservative candidates such as Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sen. Jim DeMint. She is a former radio talk show host and former president of Culture Campaign. Her history of antigay rhetoric goes way back.

Rios recently attacked Mitt Romney for saying he wouldn't reinstate "don't ask, don't tell." Rios is opposed to hate-crimes laws, and she suggested that Republican senator Mark Kirk might have been blackmailed with rumors that he's gay into supporting the federal hate-crimes law as a congressman.

On the pop-culture front, Rios once claimed that Lady Gaga's video for "Telephone" with Beyonce showed the pair as "gay lesbian lovers" and "this is poison for the minds of our kids."

Rios is not surprisingly opposed to the Employment Non-discrimination Act, a bill proposed in Congress that would make it illegal to fire an employee for being gay or lesbian (which is what Rios is advocating doing in the case of DeGeneres). She warns of the unfairness in not being allowed to fire drag queens who want to be police officers, for example. "And what exactly does that mean?" she asks of the law's impact in a 2010 op-ed. "As new applicants flood the pool, there will be no 'discrimination' allowed even in federal law enforcement against drag queens or lesbians dressing like men."

While Rios was posting her op-ed on DeGeneres, a counter campaign on Facebook surpassed 100,000 likes, more than double that of the "One Million Moms" who had called for her firing.