Reader advisory: The litigious screed that follows boldly disqualifies the author from politics as usual in New Albany. The squeamish might wish to click through to councilman Larry Kochert’s “Ward Heeling for Dummies” for solace.
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Today’s Courier-Journal runs an op-ed piece that purports to explain the late Jerry Falwell’s public career as “a theological fatalist but a political activist.”
Holy warrior, wholly committed; Falwell cared deeply for faith, country, GOP, by Zev Chafets (Special to the Los Angeles Times).
He was a born-again Christian, an American and a Republican, in that order, and if you didn’t like it, well, there were plenty of other places you could spend Sunday morning.
Nice line on the part of the apologist, although his glibness obscures the underlying truth.
The bottom line is that the American ideal – as often sadly the opposite of flawed historical practice – isn’t about deploying personal religious conviction as a convenient brass knuckle with which to disenfranchise and humiliate segments of the populace whose rights derive from purely secular sources and not the fragmented cosmos of religious superstition.
It’s important to note that not once in my life have I chosen to spend Sunday morning at the Thomas Road Baptist Church urging that the religious beliefs being touted therein by Jerry Falwell should be banned, suppressed or otherwise discouraged.
And yet Falwell spent more than 30 grimly delighted years advocating the scourging of “secular progressives” on religious grounds, a jihad that in the end is not unlike any practiced in the Muslim world – one that Falwell and other fundamentalist preachers publicly abhor but ultimately resemble in so many telling ways.
Remember Falwell’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001?
God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve … And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe 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 of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.” *
Later the godly religious beacon backpedaled. The trouble is that the sum of his teachings during the Moral Majority decades leads one to precisely such a position even if it isn’t expressed in such an ungraceful and frankly hateful manner.
The “prophet” is dead; such is the conclusion for us all.
Me? I’m for letting his doctrines follow suit.
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* From Foulwell: Rev Jerry Falwell, blaming civil libertarians, feminists, homosexuals, and abortion rights supporters for the terrorist attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, quoted from John F Harris, “God Gave US ‘What We Deserve,’ Falwell Says,” The Washington Post (September 14, 2001)
