Jerry Falwell is Dead!

by Jason Gantenberg

And good riddance.
If Evil Men exist, Jerry Falwell was one of them. He embodied what it meant to be an unimaginative thug swollen with bile and hatred, and he made himself the perfect poster boy for an entire demographic of dimwitted sociopaths hellbent on marginalizing anyone who didn’t support Puritan morality and ritual castration of Jews, Muslims, queers, and racial minorities.

In many ways, Falwell became almost singlehandedly responsible for this sordid concoction we call Modern American Politics when he made the infusion of religion in public policy acceptable, if not fashionable. Due to his efforts and
theo-political evangelism, we have a situation in this country today where good, honest secular (and other non-Christian) folks are increasingly bound to a Christian code of ethics applied via governing bodies in Washington, who have been all too willing to accommodate Falwell and his ilk for thirty years now because they, like he was, are afraid to cede influence to any individual who actually grasps the concept of a Free Society.

Moral Majority, indeed.

Let’s give the man some credit, though. Anyone who manages to peddle hatred and societal regression for as long as Falwell did without eating the Big Bullet deserves respect, if only for their ruthless efficiency. We are talking, remember, about a man who blamed the September 11 attacks on abortionists and gays among others. We are talking about a man who spent almost his entire life dehumanizing decent people in the name of God. In his own way, Jerry Falwell was the American version of Al-Qaeda.

He specialized in Holy Wars that utilized violence of the mind over violence of the body. Moral torture. Ethical sadism. These were the cornerstones of Falwell’s assault on the American public, and those who like to cite his “charity work” as proof of his undying compassion and empathetic approach toward people would do well to note that charity and missionary work are two vastly different things. Our Good Reverend was, above all else, an evangelist, a perspective merchant, which puts him two or three rungs below a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.

Nonetheless, he has done a good job of ensuring that his legacy lives on and must have thought at least momentarily about this as he lay slumped in his office this morning. Falwell’s Liberty University carries the zygote of his utterly foolish belief in the superiority of uniformity over randomness, and we can be fairly certain that at least one mutant child or another will emerge from the institution with the same wild-eyed fervor with which Jerry paraded around selling swaths of people on stagnancy and vigilante fascism during the latter years of the Twentieth Century and beyond.

With a bit of luck, he will be remembered as a wicked, infantile boob with a mind as sinister and manipulative as Josef Stalin’s and a heart as reptilian as Cardinal Richelieu’s. And that is, mind you, if he is remembered at all.

Jason is an amateur writer based in the Midwest. He is worried he will one day be sued for libel.

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