Jerry Falwell, Buh-Bye

I was going to write a column on Jerry Falwell's death. Actually, I did write that column but at the last minute decided to go with a column on Iraq.

My girlfriend thinks I shouldn't speak ill of the dead. My mother would say if you don't have anything nice to say about someone, say nothing at all. I'll have to disappoint both of them.

Falwell leaves a legacy that is a sad one. As the father of the Religious Right, he helped tear down the hedge between religion and state. His organization begat many others who spread a message of intolerance of homosexuals and a denial of science.

I can understand a church teaching that homosexual acts are immoral. After all churches teach that many things in society are immoral. And no one is compelled to like anyone in our country. In my church, smoking, drinking, masturbating, and dancing were /are considered immoral. But what these organizations do is go a step further. They use bogus studies to support absurd conclusions about homosexuals. They publish tracts saying gays are more likely to be molesters and murderers. I'm not making this up. And they use this "information" to pressure local school districts and government to impact gays professionally and socially.

The non-stop anti-gay rhetoric bolsters efforts by crackpots like the Rev. Fred Phelps, whose church pickets funerals of gays who died of AIDS. These are the subhuman slime who appear at funerals and hold signs saying "God Hates Fags" and "Your Loved One is Burning in Hell."

The U.S. already lags many countries in science, so what the Religious Right has done to us is unforgivable. By pressuring our idiot government into not backing stem cell research, wasting time on climate change solutions, spinning red tape on the Plan B pill, and watering down science in schools, they've harmed America.

At one time, Falwell was opposed to preachers getting mixed up in politics. He was a critic of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Falwell was a segregationist who had people like Lester Maddox on his Old Time Gospel Hour show, before changing his tune.

And while King and the Civil Rights Movement was sustained by faith, their goal wasn't to make the U.S. government more Christian. It was to get the U.S. to live up to its creed.

This country was founded on religious freedom. People wanted the freedom to worship as they saw fit. Or to not be persecuted for not worshipping.

Am I going to say that Jerry Falwell did no good in his 73 years. Of course not. Falwell ran a home for people trying to get sober. He shepherded many students through their education at his university. And while I may not agree with him, he did manage to successfully build an organization that got people involved on a grass roots level that became a model for many other groups.

But Falwell's legacy will be a legacy of undermining the government with his brash mixing of religion and politics. His legacy will be one of division instead of healing.

What would Jesus do?