KlausIt's kind of hard to know where to begin in addressing the death of "Moral" "Majority" founder and professional rock-throwing villager Jerry "Hellmouth" Falwell.  It seems like it was about two hours after I came out of the closet back in the deep, dark Reagan 80's that Falwell rose to prominence on a wine-dark wave of oily sanctimony and anti-gay bigotry, which he rode all the way to the highest reaches of government.

Yes, Falwell is the man we have to thank for the "Christian" Right's ongoing assault on the wall between church and state and the unconscionable incursions of religion into American public policy. The infringement of snake-handling faux-Christian bigotry into government has placed our country years behind the rest of the world in terms of personal liberty, women's rights, gay rights, public health, AIDS treatment and research, and education.  (Not to mention stem-cell research, science education, and even the arts.)

Falwell made gay-bashing into a cottage industry and then into a corporate and political juggernaut.  His "ministry" provided the template for Empires of Hate like Pat Robertson's multi-million-dollar television network and associated enterprises, as well as the ever-vile Fred Phelps's merry band of slope-headed funeral crashers, and Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, as well as your Dobsons, Brent Bozells, and even the smarmy lily-white preacherisms of disgraced Tennessee Senator Bill Frist.

Still, in Falwell's declining years, even other Far-Right radicals were beginning to disown him as his statements became ever more extreme and nonsensical.  The Sagacious Digby has an excellent run-down of Falwell's career, which begins thusly:

Everyone will be writing remembrances and elegies for Jerry Falwell today because he had an enormous influence on American life of the past quarter century which will continue to be felt for some time to come. In his favor, I can say that he always seemed to be a man of good humor and calm demeanor who seemed to know on some level that he was playing a role, whether political or theatrical. But his rather placid personality can't make up for the fact that he was at the epicenter of some of the most "uncivil" and unseemly political hit-jobs of the past couple of decades.
Steve Benen has a nice round-up of his greatest hits at the Carpetbagger Report, but there's one episode that I think most aptly symbolizes his legacy. If you want to see one of the more vivid examples of where the discourse went directly into the sewer, look no further than this:
"The Clinton Chronicles: An Investigation into the Alleged Criminal Activities of Bill Clinton," is a 1994 film created by Patrick Matrisciana. This video explored the deaths of Vincent Foster and an alleged cocaine-smuggling operation. These deaths were part of the debunked conspiracy theory known as the "Clinton Body Count", which grew as years went by, as connections to Clinton were added with varying degrees of allegedly suspicious circumstances surrounding the deaths.

[...]

VHS copies of the film were promoted and distributed via television infomercials by Moral Majority leader Rev. Jerry Falwell, who also appears in the film. Falwell's infomercial for the 80-minute tape included footage of Falwell interviewing a silhouetted journalist who was afraid for his life. The journalist accused Clinton of orchestrating the deaths of several reporters and personal confidants who had gotten too close to his illegalities. However, it was subsequently revealed that the silhouetted journalist was, in fact, Patrick Matrisciana, the producer of the video and president of Citizens for Honest Government. "Obviously, I'm not an investigative reporter," Matrisciana admitted (to investigative journalist Murray Waas), "and I doubt our lives were actually ever in any real danger. That was Jerry's idea to do that ... He thought that would be dramatic."

So, just for the record, apparently Falwell-style "Family Values" included overt falsehoods, unfounded rumor-mongering, and baseless accusations of murder and extortion, all in the name of subverting the political process.  But, you know, look around the web tonight.  The hits keep coming.

Carpetbagger has a round-up of Rev. Punkinhead's Greatest Hits, including such toe-tappers as:

August 1980: After Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith tells a Dallas Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” Falwell gives a similar view. “I do not believe,” he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.” After a meeting with an American Jewish Committee rabbi, he changed course, telling an interviewer on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “God hears the prayers of all persons…. God hears everything.”

July 1984: Falwell is forced to pay gay activist Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle. During a TV debate in Sacramento, Falwell denied calling the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches “brute beasts” and “a vile and Satanic system” that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” When Sloan insisted he had a tape, Falwell promised $5,000 if he could produce it. Sloan did so, Falwell refused to pay and Sloan successfully sued. Falwell appealed, with his attorney charging that the Jewish judge in the case was prejudiced. He lost again and was forced to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.

October 1987: The Federal Election Commission fines Falwell for transferring $6.7 million in funds intended for his ministry to political committees.

November 1997: Falwell accepts $3.5 million from a front group representing controversial Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to ease Liberty University’s financial woes.

January 1999: Falwell tells a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., that the Antichrist prophesied in the Bible is alive today and “of course he’ll be Jewish.”

February 1999: Falwell becomes the object of nationwide ridicule after his National Liberty Journal newspaper issues a “parents alert” warning that Tinky Winky, a character on the popular PBS children’s show “Teletubbies,” might be gay.

And, of course, my personal favorite:

September 2001: Falwell blames Americans for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “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.’”

Because Lord knows, it was a bunch of Lesbian Pagan Anti-Religionists who hijacked those planes and flew them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.  A band of religious true-believers would never do a thing like that!

Let's go to Alan Wolfe at Salon:

One never wants to speak ill of the dead, but in the case of Jerry Falwell, how can one not?

Say 'Amen!', somebody.  Can I get a witness?

And that, really, is Falwell's legacy. To the religious life of the United States he made no significant contribution. But to the political life of the country, he made one: He founded the Moral Majority. In so doing, Falwell managed to take something holy -- one does not have to be a Christian to admire the life and teachings of Jesus Christ -- and turned it into something partisan and divisive. Falwell, the quintessential conservative Christian, was always more conservative than Christian. To the extent that history will remember him, it will be as a politician, not as a preacher.

Indeed.  We come here tonight to bury Falwell, not to praise him.

Instead of pondering Jerry Falwell's legacy, we would be better off asking how this man ever become a public figure in the first place. America has had more than its share of religiously inspired demagogues -- Dr. Fred Swartz, Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntyre come to mind -- but they are forgotten figures, marginal even to the times in which lived. One would like to believe that the United States has become a bigger and better country since the days when men like them preached about captive nations and denounced the pernicious influence of rock 'n' roll. But then there is Jerry Falwell. In death, as he did in life, he reminds us that demagoguery never dies; it just changes its form. Jerry Falwell expressed great hate for a lot of his fellow Americans. It is no wonder that so many of them will greet his death with something less than love.

I'm certainly not weeping buckets.  And at least God put him down in a swift and fairly painless manner, rather than having him, say, fall out of a sixth floor window to die impaled on a spiked fence, squirming like a salted slug.  But I do believe that when a person has made a life of polluting the world with violent, irrational hatred of their fellow man, the human race is perhaps a little richer for their passing.

And that, my friends, is all I have to say about that.