Falwell Farewell

The website TMZ.com posted a picture of Teletubby Tinky Winky waving bye-bye under the words “Jerry Falwell 1933-2007.” Falwell once accused the children’s character of being a gay role model. Maybe it was in poor taste but Falwell was no stranger to poor taste.

Jerry Falwell actually played a role in my leaving the church I was raised in. I was angry to find political Moral Majority literature in my church foyer prior to the 1984 election profiling candidates. I felt it had no business in church. It was really the proverbial straw for me. Falwell took a weed whacker to the hedge between church and state with often ugly consequences.

While Falwell will be remembered as the father of the Religious Right and successfully fusing God with the G.O.P., for many he was what Sen. John McCain said he was an “agent of intolerance.”

This man hawked a videotape in the 1990’s called “The Clinton Chronicles” that accused the President of drug smuggling and murder. He later admitted he couldn’t vouch for the research in the “documentary.”

Falwell is the man who once wrote "I hope I live to see the day when…we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them." Statements like that rightfully worried those who envision a wall between church and state.

Falwell said AIDS was God’s wrath for homosexuals, feminists just need a man and Mohammad was a terrorist. Falwell, like many of his colleagues, could always be counted on to say the wrong thing at the wrong time.

After 9/11, Falwell famously told fellow religious crackpot Pat Robertson that “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 “helped this happen.”

Another legacy of the Moral Majority is with us in the present administration, an administration that denies science for faith. In the Bush Administration, climate change can be combated by simply changing the words scientists use to describe it. Evolution can be denied in favor of Creationism 2.0, intelligent design. Their influence caused Plan B, the morning after pill, to be held up by red tape and when it was finally released over the counter, it’s still difficult to acquire the contraceptive drug. The influence of Falwell’s disciples has caused this anti-science President to limit stem cell research.

To hear the Religious Right tell it, if Jesus Christ returned to earth today he would be obsessed with abortions, gay marriage, the homosexual agenda, the entertainment industry, stem cell research, school prayer, and displaying the Ten Commandments in school.

I think Jesus would be angry we could let something like Katrina happen and not rescue, clothe, feed and house those people. Perhaps He’d shake his head that people could actually be hungry in this land of abundance. Maybe he’d take out that whip and go after Wall Street and give us his millionth sermon about the perils of being a rich man. Maybe he’d chastise us for not turning the other cheek. And don’t let Him get started on Iraq.

I think that’s what has always been missing from Jerry Falwell’s rants. Falwell and the organizations that have come after him in the Religious Right have done a great job of giving us that old time fire and brimstone religion. Where’s the Sermon on the Mount? Where’s Jesus been all these years?