Oh, Happy Day! Someone once said, "The world changes only in that some people die and others are born." Today, the world changed for the better, because a very bad man died.
+
Jerry Falwell was the face of 'Christian' intolerance, a Southern bigot who did not cleave to the racial bigotry of his region, probably because he was from Virginia (tho from the unfortunately named "Lynchburg"), not Mississippi, and saw the handwriting on the wall. So he just moved the energies a Southern bigot might ordinarily have directed against blacks to another innocent target having nothing to do with his life: homosexuals. And just as Rightwing 'Christians' had used the Bible to rationalize away racial bigotry and even slavery, Falwell used the "Good Book" to attack gay men. (As for the term "Good Book", it is to laff! The Bible, albeit mainly the Jewish part, is filled with violence and wickedness held up as God's will. What a monster the God of the Old Testament is!)
+
The good that Falwell may have done in opposing abortion, helping unwed mothers, opposing embryonic stem-cell research, and everything else was more than undone by his vicious incitement to hatred of people who never did him the slitest harm before he attacked them.
+
It's a pity there's no life for even an instant after death so Falwell could see there just plain isn't any God, and his whole life was based on a lie.
+
Falwell was a bad man whose influence on public life was far more malevolent and destructive — genuinely un-Christian — than constructive, and now he is dead. Hurray! Next? How about Pat Robertson. Die, you old fool! When Robertson does die, there will be joy in Venezuela's Presidential Palace and in western Newark.
+
Let's hope that in Falwell's and Robertson's cases, Shakespeare's observation that "The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interrèd with their bones" is wrong. Maybe, once the prime champions of Christianity as self-righteous bigotry have died, the true Christianity of charity and the pursuit of social justice — on Earth, not in nonexistent "Heaven" — will recapture the minds of Christians even in the South.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,401 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:07 PM