The Rev. Jerry Falwell was stricken at his campus office and died Tuesday after a career in which the evangelist used the power of television to transform the religious right into a mighty force in American politics. He was 73.
The founder of the Moral Majority was discovered without a pulse at Liberty University and pronounced dead at a hospital an hour later. Dr. Carl Moore, Falwell’s physician, said he had a heart condition and presumably died of a heart rhythm abnormality.
Driven into politics by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established the right to an abortion, Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. One of the conservative lobbying group’s greatest triumphs came just a year later, when Ronald Reagan was elected president.
Falwell credited the Moral Majority with getting millions of conservative voters registered, aiding in Reagan’s victory and giving Republicans control of the Senate.
He seemed to find a place along with James Dobson [an equally self-righteous middle level Charlatan] between the more rational Evangelists like Billy Graham and the whack-jobs like Jimmy Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart. I expect that there will be some people singing "ding dong the witch is dead" and others who will try to be more respectful in deference to his family or his followers. For myself, I think we never knew him. All we knew was his bloated sense of self importance and his impact as a force for prejudice – unleashing and legitimizing a political movement that carried a cross of bigotry and elitism into the White House. Jerry Falwell was a real player in the debacle of the Bush Administration. In many ways, his ability to disguise hatred and contempt behind the euphemism of "Family Values" was the template for the more secular politicians that surfed Falwell’s wave into Washington. His preaching against the judiciary probably fueled some of the sentiment that lead to the current crisis at the Justice Department. But, besides his specifics, he originated and promulgated the ludicrous claim that the United States is a Christian Nation rather than a nation with religious freedom. It is his most terrible legacy.
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