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Jerry Falwell is dead

Chris_Doane

By Chris_Doane
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trinacriabob Veteran

trinacriabob

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I plead ignorance. All I know is that he represents (or represented) a slice of redneck Americana called "The Moral Majority" or something to that effect. I know that he got a lot of people worked up. I've grown up and lived in various multi-cultural / multi-everything coastal metro areas, so people like that are not a part of my reality. Their lack of worldliness is almost frightening, as far as I can tell.

Natural death or foul play?

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Chris_Doane Newbie

Chris_Doane

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Please stick to posting information and pictures of future cars. Your posts in this thread are despicable and immature.

:rolleyes:

Hmm lets see....nah think I'll just keep doing what I want.

The only thing despicable is Falwell. If you can't see that you're are as blind as he was.

Edited by Chris_Doane
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Sixty8panther Newbie

Sixty8panther

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While I don't celebrate the death of someone who hasn't earned it, I know the Christian community made of honest, tolerent people is better off without a person spewing such illogically hateful rhetoric.

Ahhh-greed.

God, if he exists probably hates hypocracy as much as I do.

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trinacriabob Veteran

trinacriabob

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I know the Christian community made of honest, tolerent people is better off without a person spewing such illogically hateful rhetoric.

Christianity (ALL branches of it, including Catholicism) says it's all about tolerance, mercy and forgiveness. It's a hard task to live up to. I don't like everybody (like a friend in Portland likes to say, "God loves you, doesn't mean I have to"). However, one can at least tolerate someone / a group if they are vastly different from you and allow them "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This means that Falwell evidently never bought into the Christian message.

I tend to ignore ALL televangelists and religious zealots. Too intense for my taste and I dont' have enough hours in the day as it is.

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76ChevyTrucker Newbie

76ChevyTrucker

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I'm lik you bob. The man upstairs wants all of us to do one thing, love one another as he does, now does that mean everyone is going to like everyone, no. But at least be tolerable about it. I have to agree, I don't exactly go out and do backflips over someone passing, but hearing this brings me fairly well close because he was a close-minded and hateful individual.

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Guest YellowJacket894

Guest YellowJacket894

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Farewell Falwell. Maybe someone in Hell can actually beat Hitler in a game of poker now.

So ... let's see God ... you have Falwell down, Pat Robinson to go. Not an easy task, I gather.

Edited by YellowJacket894
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aaaantoine Newbie

aaaantoine

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The "Moral Majority"... Having Faith in God is good. Politicizing God, on the other hand, is very, very dangerous, as we've seen.

For example, Bush does a bunch of stuff, often citing his faith in God. This got him the Christian vote, twice. Yet, how do we know he's not merely playing to the masses to win the vote? I've wondered about this a number of times. Sometimes I think he's so unpopular because he's doing the work of God. Other times I think, this guy is just a terrible president.

There are a number of key issues that the Religious right focus upon: Abortion, Gay Marriage, and Stem Cell Research, to name the most popular. My opinions don't necessarily agree with the Church's (abortion always equals murder, though murder is sometimes justified; there should at least be a legal civil union allowed between homosexual partners; find what you can using legally procured stem cells), but that's not the point; these morality issues are interfering with REAL problems relating to national security and economic defense.

Our Education system. Our Social Security. The Asian influence on our economy. The oursourcing of our jobs. These are VITAL issues. But everyone's up in arms about abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research. Well, congratulations, Jerry. Not only has America not become more receptive to Christianity, but you have also distracted us from the important issues that the nation depends on. Now do you think that was God's will?

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trinacriabob Veteran

trinacriabob

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Our Education system. Our Social Security. The Asian influence on our economy. The oursourcing of our jobs. These are VITAL issues. But everyone's up in arms about abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research. Well, congratulations, Jerry. Not only has America not become more receptive to Christianity, but you have also distracted us from the important issues that the nation depends on. Now do you think that was God's will?

Well, aaaantoine, that's because his (and their) base level is kind of "hick" ...sorry to say. How one feels about abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research can be so rooted in religion, thus they don't have to "crunch any numbers" to determine economic impact and policy. On the other hand, what a country does regarding education, social security and outsourcing jobs can draw little from a Biblical context, does not require any economic modeling and is too "esoteric," so these rednecks can be reactionary on baseline moral issues while these bigger issues are too complex for them to come to terms with. It doesn't make for good pulpit material, anyway. That's why the minute I hear any evangelist that sounds either too smooth or too forceful, "click." Their viewpoints tend to very limited and not very holistic. Edited by trinacriabob
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Enzora Newbie

Enzora

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It doesn't make for good pulpit material, anyway.

I'd disagree with that, at least to some degree. There is plenty of material in liberal messages that can be put in a religious context that would gain the support of the religious community, issues such as "love thy neighbor" that are very basic to Christianity, and definitely more so than hating gays and abortion.

Case in point: the 1960s liberation theology movement in Latin America. Prior to this, the idea was that reward for a good life would be in heaven, so that people should just be content with their state in life as it was. Then more radical leaders came in and offered a reinterpretation of scriptures that encouraged these people to become active in seeking improvement in their actual lives (think political activism, not hustling preachers who say "if you believe it really hard, God will make it happen.")

Of course, established powers have since stifled this movement, but the point remains. Placing things in a religious context makes it much more approachable for a large portion of the population, something I don't think that many liberals have an easy time comprehending, and definitely something they haven't been successful in actually doing.

Of course, a lot of these religious messages are really just exploitation of existing bigotries that nobody likes to admit are there, but that placing in religious terms allows people to practice these bigotries guilt-free. Which is a very different/uglier beast indeed.

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Oracle of Delphi Newbie

Oracle of Delphi

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Well, aaaantoine, that's because his (and their) base level is kind of "hick" ...sorry to say. How one feels about abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research can be so rooted in religion, thus they don't have to "crunch any numbers" to determine economic impact and policy. On the other hand, what a country does regarding education, social security and outsourcing jobs can draw little from a Biblical context, does not require any economic modeling and is too "esoteric," so these rednecks can be reactionary on baseline moral issues while these bigger issues are too complex for them to come to terms with. It doesn't make for good pulpit material, anyway. That's why the minute I hear any evangelist that sounds either too smooth or too forceful, "click." Their viewpoints tend to very limited and not very holistic.

Hey watch it, I'm a Redneck!

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Guest YellowJacket894

Guest YellowJacket894

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Please stick to posting information and pictures of future cars. Your posts in this thread are despicable and immature.

Guess you were one of those guys who went out and purchased Renyold's aluminum foil by the square acre, huh?

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Cadillacfan Newbie

Cadillacfan

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Now come on guys, he may have been a bigot, racist, homophobe, asshole but can you at least wait a couple of weeks before you start with the the bashing. Monsters have family too. :pbjtime:

Edited by Cadillacfan
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CARBIZ Newbie

CARBIZ

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It saddens me that in this beginning of the 21st Century, a clown like this even gets recognition. It merely shows how very far that we, as a race and a society, have to go before we acheive true intelligence.

I will always remember the hate and venom he spread when I was a student and trying to find my place in the world.

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ehaase

ehaase

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You young fellows need to learn to be gracious like your elders who also disagreed with Jerry Falwell's views. Just because you dislike what a person says doesn't mean you have to be nasty, as many posts in this thread have been.

Larry Flynt: My friend, Jerry Falwell

How the pornographer found himself in the embrace of the reverend who sued him.

By Larry Flynt, LARRY FLYNT is the publisher of Hustler magazine and the author of "Sex, Lies and Politics."

May 20, 2007

THE FIRST TIME the Rev. Jerry Falwell put his hands on me, I was stunned. Not only had we been archenemies for 15 years, his beliefs and mine traveling in different solar systems, and not only had he sued me for $50 million (a case I lost repeatedly yet eventually won in the Supreme Court), but now he was hugging me in front of millions on the Larry King show.

It was 1997. My autobiography, "An Unseemly Man," had just been published, describing my life as a publisher of pornography. The film "The People vs. Larry Flynt" had recently come out, and the country was well aware of the battle that Falwell and I had fought: a battle that had changed the laws governing what the American public can see and hear in the media and that had dramatically strengthened our right to free speech.

King was conducting the interview. It was the first time since the infamous 1988 trial that the reverend and I had been in the same room together, and the thought of even breathing the same air with him made me sick. I disagreed with Falwell (who died last week) on absolutely everything he preached, and he looked at me as symbolic of all the social ills that a society can possibly have. But I'd do anything to sell the book and the film, and Falwell would do anything to preach, so King's audience of 8 million viewers was all the incentive either of us needed to bring us together.

But let's start at the beginning and flash back to the late 1970s, when the battle between Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, and I first began. I was publishing Hustler magazine, which most people know has been pushing the envelope of taste from the very beginning, and Falwell was blasting me every chance he had. He would talk about how I was a slime dealer responsible for the decay of all morals. He called me every terrible name he could think of — names as bad, in my opinion, as any language used in my magazine.

After several years of listening to him bash me and reading his insults, I decided it was time to start poking some fun at him. So we ran a parody ad in Hustler — a takeoff on the then-current Campari ads in which people were interviewed describing "their first time." In the ads, it ultimately became clear that the interviewees were describing their first time sipping Campari. But not in our parody. We had Falwell describing his "first time" as having been with his mother, "drunk off our God-fearing asses," in an outhouse.

Apparently, the reverend didn't find the joke funny. He sued us for libel in federal court in Virginia, claiming that the magazine had inflicted emotional stress on him. It was a long and tedious fight, beginning in 1983 and ending in 1988, but Hustler Magazine Inc. vs. Jerry Falwell was without question my most important battle.

We lost in our initial jury trial, and we lost again in federal appeals court. After spending a fortune, everyone's advice to me was to just settle the case and be done, but I wasn't listening; I wasn't about to pay Falwell $200,000 for hurting his feelings or, as his lawyers called it, "intentional infliction of emotional distress." We appealed to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, and I lost for a third time.

Everyone was certain this was the end. We never thought the U.S. Supreme Court would agree to hear the case. But it did, and though I felt doomed throughout the trial and was convinced that I was going to lose, we never gave up. As we had moved up the judicial ladder, this case had become much more than just a personal battle between a pornographer and a preacher, because the 1st Amendment was so much at the heart of the case.

To my amazement, we won. It wasn't until after I won the case and read the justices' unanimous decision in my favor that I realized fully the significance of what had happened. The justices held that a parody of a public figure was protected under the 1st Amendment even if it was outrageous, even if it was "doubtless gross and repugnant," as they put it, and even if it was designed to inflict emotional distress. In a unanimous decision — written by, of all people, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist — the court reasoned that if it supported Falwell's lower-court victory, no one would ever have to prove something was false and libelous to win a judgment. All anyone would have to prove is that "he upset me" or "she made me feel bad." The lawsuits would be endless, and that would be the end of free speech.

Everyone was shocked at our victory — and no one more so than Falwell, who on the day of the decision called me a "sleaze merchant" hiding behind the 1st Amendment. Still, over time, Falwell was forced to publicly come to grips with the reality that this is America, where you can make fun of anyone you want. That hadn't been absolutely clear before our case, but now it's being taught in law schools all over the country, and our case is being hailed as one of the most important free-speech cases of the 20th century.

No wonder that when he started hugging me and smooching me on television 10 years later, I was a bit confused. I hadn't seen him since we'd been in court together, and that night I didn't see him until I came out on the stage. I was expecting (and looking for) a fight, but instead he was putting his hands all over me. I remember thinking, "I spent $3 million taking that case to the Supreme Court, and now this guy wants to put his hand on my leg?"

Soon after that episode, I was in my office in Beverly Hills, and out of nowhere my secretary buzzes me, saying, "Jerry Falwell is here to see you." I was shocked, but I said, "Send him in." We talked for two hours, with the latest issues of Hustler neatly stacked on my desk in front of him. He suggested that we go around the country debating, and I agreed. We went to colleges, debating moral issues and 1st Amendment issues — what's "proper," what's not and why.

In the years that followed and up until his death, he'd come to see me every time he was in California. We'd have interesting philosophical conversations. We'd exchange personal Christmas cards. He'd show me pictures of his grandchildren. I was with him in Florida once when he complained about his health and his weight, so I suggested that he go on a diet that had worked for me. I faxed a copy to his wife when I got back home.

The truth is, the reverend and I had a lot in common. He was from Virginia, and I was from Kentucky. His father had been a bootlegger, and I had been one too in my 20s before I went into the Navy. We steered our conversations away from politics, but religion was within bounds. He wanted to save me and was determined to get me out of "the business."

My mother always told me that no matter how repugnant you find a person, when you meet them face to face you will always find something about them to like. The more I got to know Falwell, the more I began to see that his public portrayals were caricatures of himself. There was a dichotomy between the real Falwell and the one he showed the public.

He was definitely selling brimstone religion and would do anything to add another member to his mailing list. But in the end, I knew what he was selling, and he knew what I was selling, and we found a way to communicate.

I always kicked his ass about his crazy ideas and the things he said. Every time I'd call him, I'd get put right through, and he'd let me berate him about his views. When he was getting blasted for his ridiculous homophobic comments after he wrote his "Tinky Winky" article cautioning parents that the purple Teletubby character was in fact gay, I called him in Florida and yelled at him to "leave the Tinky Winkies alone."

When he referred to Ellen Degeneres in print as Ellen "Degenerate," I called him and said, "What are you doing? You don't need to poison the whole lake with your venom." I could hear him mumbling out of the side of his mouth, "These lesbians just drive me crazy." I'm sure I never changed his mind about anything, just as he never changed mine.

I'll never admire him for his views or his opinions. To this day, I'm not sure if his television embrace was meant to mend fences, to show himself to the public as a generous and forgiving preacher or merely to make me uneasy, but the ultimate result was one I never expected and was just as shocking a turn to me as was winning that famous Supreme Court case: We became friends.

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avant1963 Newbie

avant1963

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Falwell made himself a PUBLIC figure, which means he gets PUBLIC scrutiny whether alive or dead. He was not a private person, and those areas of his life that were private, those of us that only knew him from his PUBLIC persona will never know. Once you put yourself out there as a PUBLIC figure, you put yourself out there with what you want people to know about you and Falwell was a hateful, nasty PUBLIC person. In private, his wife has lost a husband and his children a father which is sad. We are not speaking of that realm. It's the PUBLIC realm and I feel the world is a better place without him. My only hope is that there is one moment of clarity before we leave this mortal coil when all becomes clear that there is nothing else but what we know as life, and he came to the realization that all his spewed hate-speech was for naught. These are times that I wish there was a hell so he could suffer there.

Christopher Hitchens said it best this week on Hannity and Colmes:

"If you gave Jerry Falwell an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox."

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Robert Hall Veteran

Robert Hall

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Good riddance...it would be nice to see more EOWGs (Evil Old White Guys) like Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Donald Wildmon go away permanently... all they have done is spread a message of hate and intolerance disguised as religion.

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Mule Bakersdozen LS Newbie

Mule Bakersdozen LS

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I've never really heard Jerry Falwell in most Christian circles-been a born-again Christian going to a Calvary Church body for almost 3 years-the only place I heard of Falwell was in MAD Magazine, that's about it. Sad he's dead, but as for where he is, God knows and cares, its not my place.

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ehaase

ehaase

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I've never really heard Jerry Falwell in most Christian circles-been a born-again Christian going to a Calvary Church body for almost 3 years-the only place I heard of Falwell was in MAD Magazine, that's about it. Sad he's dead, but as for where he is, God knows and cares, its not my place.

He was well known in Southern Baptist (which I am) and Independent Fundamentalist Baptist circles, but he was more respected in the 1960's and 1970's before getting involved in politics. His church was very innovative and grew very quickly in those days. Many lost respect for him after his positive comments about Billy Graham and the Pope in the 1980's. Charismatics, and I presume you are one attending a Calvary church, dislike him for his involvement in the downfall of PTL and Jim and Tammy Bakker.
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Chris_Doane Newbie

Chris_Doane

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New Rule: Death isn't always sad. [photo of Jerry Falwell shown]This week, the Reverend Jerry Falwell died, and millions of Americans asked, "Why? Why, God? Why didn't you take Pat Robertson with him?!" I don't want to -- I don't want to say Jerry was disliked by the gay community, but, tonight, in New York City, at exactly 8:00, Broadway theaters along the Great White Way, for two minutes, turned their lights up.

Now, I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I think we can make an exception, because speaking ill of the dead was kind of Jerry Falwell's hobby. He was the guy who said AIDS was God's punishment for homosexuality, and that 9/11 was brought on by pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and the ACLU. Or as I like to call them, "my studio audience."

But, I found it surreal this week watching people on the news praise Falwell, followed by a clip package of what he actually said. Things like, "Homosexuals are part of a vile and satanic system that will be utterly annihilated." "If you're a born again Christian, you're a failure as a... If you're not a born again Christian, you're a failure as a human being." "Feminists just need a man around the house." "There is no separation of church and state." And of course, everyone's favorite, "The purple Teletubby is gay."

Jerry Falwell found out that you could launder your hate through the cover of God's will. He didn't hate gays. God does. All Jerry Falwell's power came from name-dropping God. And gay people should steal that trick.

You know what? Don't say you want something because it's your right as a human being. Say you want it because it's your religion. Gay men have been going at things backwards. Forget civil rights and just make gayness a religion. I mean, you're kneeling anyway.

And it's easy to start a religion. Watch. I'll do it for you. I had a vision last night. A vision. The Blessed Virgin Mary came to me. I don't know how she got past the guards. And she told me it's high time to take the high ground from the Seventh Day Adventists and give it to the 24-Hour Party People. And that what happens in the confessional stays in the confessional.

Gay men, don't say you're life partners. Say you're a nunnery of two. "We weren't having sex, officer. I was performing a very private Mass. Here in my car. I was letting my rod and my staff comfort him."

"Take this, and eat of it, for this is my roommate, Barry."

"And for all those who truly believe, there's a special place for you, in 'Kevin.'"

And, speaking of heaven, one can only hope that as Jerry Falwell now approaches the Pearly Gates, he is met there by God Himself, wearing a Fire Island muscle shirt and nut-hugger shorts, and saying to Jerry in mighty lisp, "I'm not talking to you!"

--5/18/07 Real Time on HBO

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