commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michelle_goldberg/2007/05/falwells_folly.html
Michelle Goldberg Michelle Goldberg The late Jerry Falwell The man who called the Teletubbies gay also opposed civil rights, blamed 9/11 on lesbians, and built a more conservative America.
Howard Phillips, saw an opportunity to recruit social conservatives to the Republican Party. Evangelicals had recently emerged as an important political force - they helped elect one of their own, Democrat Jimmy Carter, to the presidency in 1976 - and Weyrich and his colleagues had a plan to lure these voters to the GOP.
Focus on the Family and various statewide networks in recent years. But Falwell remained relevant, despite the attempts of some embarrassed Republicans to ignore him. Just ask John McCain, who tried to defy the reverend and his movement in 2000, calling Falwell and Robertson "agents of intolerance". His subsequent losses in the Virginia and South Carolina primaries taught him a lesson about the party he hopes to lead, so last year he traveled to Lynchburg, Virginia to give the commencement speech at Falwell's Liberty University. As McCain's humiliating genuflection shows, Falwell and his successors have managed to remake the party in their image. It's hard to believe now, when evangelicals and fundamentalists make up the most organized bloc in American politics, but before the Moral Majority a person's churchgoing habits didn't tell you much about how they voted, and politicians weren't expected to make lavish displays of their piety. The notion of church/state separation, now widely regarded by Republicans as part of a devious war against Christianity, was a widely shared principle. Falwell himself once denounced preachers who got involved in governance, though not out of devotion to a secular republic: As a committed segregationist, he decried the work of Martin Luther King Jr, saying, "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners." The religious right's creation myth holds that Roe v Wade so outraged the faithful that they could no longer sit passively on their pews. As the Columbia University historian Randall Balmer has shown, this is nonsense.
Southern Baptist Convention, Falwell's denomination, was officially pro-choice throughout the 1970s; anti-abortion activism was seen as the province of Catholics, a group then widely despised by fundamentalist Protestants. No, what really galvanized the religious right were Supreme Court rulings stripping whites-only Christian academies, like the one Falwell founded in 1966, of their tax-exempt status. Fervent opposition to abortion, which eventually cemented the alliance between conservative Protestant and Catholics, came later. Perhaps because of the power he accumulated, or because of the American media's tendency to indulge the far right while marginalising the moderate left, Falwell was able to escape the taint of this history. He would eventually and expediently repent of his opposition to integration, but his general radicalism didn't abate - he famously blamed the carnage of September 11 on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America." No matter what he said, though, the weird amnesiac alchemy of American politics ensured that he remained a somewhat acceptable figure, courted by politicians and network TV shows alike. Towards the end of his life, he even had the awe-inspiring audacity to invoke Martin Luther King Jr as an inspiration. Just last year, I saw Falwell speak at a rally against liberal judges at a black Baptist church in Philadelphia. The room was alive with foot-stomping gospel enthusiasm, and Falwell smiled on the stage as King's rightwing niece Alveda, a frequent guest at conservative conferences, sang "We Shall Overcome". Falwell was one of a series of preachers, both black and white, who summoned the language and imagery of the civil rights movement. well, over the very liberal courts whose civil rights rulings propelled Falwell into politics in the first place. It is evidence of Falwell's triumph that few considered this spectacle anything but ordinary.
At the rather prominent catholic boys high school that I attended in australia, the head of religion, an american nun, used to quite often say, "I can't wait to get to heaven to find out that god's a black lesbian." Not always appreciated by a very small minority of the parents but highly appreciated by the student body (iconoclasm being the second favourite sport after rugby).
May 15 23:22 GBR The world is a little better off now that someone like him has gone. Though I'm sure some other lunatic will come along to fill the void he has left behind.
May 15 23:25 GBR Sometimes I wish I was religious and believed there was a hell. It would be comforting to think he was suffering now instead of just being compost.
May 15 23:42 USA I don't know why this man is deserving of a Comment is Free piece. Saying on here that Jerry Falwell was a bad man (which he was) is a bit like preaching to the choir, is it not? Not a concern of mine, except to appreciate that he is one less high-profile right-wing commentator appearing regularly on the major American news channels.
May 16 2:24 CAN That great bulk, Jerry Falwell, has eaten his last family-size bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yes, Jerry has ordered his last tent-sized silk suit, taken his last bag of cash from lonely old ladies, and ordered his last truckload of cheap, merchandising Bibles with his picture stamped on the cover. He donated his organs, the only gesture of kindness recorded in his adult life, but they were all rejected, except for the spleen, reportedly large enough to serve three. The following piece, written some years ago still aptly summarizes his legacy. October 18, 2002 JABBA APOLOGIZES John Chuckman The Reverend Jerry Falwell has apologized again. His first, as we all know, is using national television to promote the kind of intolerance and ignorance long associated with sweltery, fly-blown corners of America's South. It's a profitable business by the looks of Falwell's cascading jowls and tailored, tent-size suits. He generally doesn't apologize for these activities, whether it is his retailing of video-tapes sensationalizing the pitiful suicide of a member of President Clinton's staff, or his spending countless hours blubbering from the pulpit against the lives of people who happen to be gay. He once alerted the nation to dangerous hidden tendencies he discovered in a British television show for children, a harmless piece of fluff called Teletubbies. Falwell gravely warned America that one of the tubbies was promoting homosexuality. Being a hate-entrepreneur or appealing to the worst instincts of nitwits is not an unusual occupation in America. There are many people who make handsome livings much the way Falwell does, and they are not isolated in the dark corners of American society. Success in accumulating money and making a name for yourself, however achieved, counts far more than decency or intelligence in America. Falwell's second-favorite occupation is making idiotic statements blaming others for disasters. In this he displays a common American trait, blaming others for what goes wrong. But Falwell takes the practice to a lunatic level, the best example being his statement, just days after 9/11, that America's liberal and gay citizens were responsible for God's allowing such destruction. Going way back to 1985, Falwell apologized to Jewish Americans for regularly using the expression "Christian America." He said he wouldn't use it in future, but nasty old habits are tough to break, and, in fact, he did use it again. In 1999, he again apologized to Jews for what probably qualifies as his most bizarre and inexplicable utterance, "Antichrist was probably alive and that he was in the form of a male Jew." His apology expressed regret for having said these disturbing words but did not disavow belief in them. Odd that on a recent tour in the United States, Mr Netanyahu - Israel's answer to Richard Nixon with a generous dash of John Gotti toss...
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