I love this article, if for no other reason than it demonstrates how wonderfully complex our world is. In this case, the authors of "The Legacy of Falwell's Bully Pulpit" demonstrate how even the actions of an intolerant, bigoted person can sometimes backfire and result in the exact opposite of what that person intended. Thus:
Gay advocates, gradually realizing that they could not beat [Jerry Falwell] through vehemence alone, learned to seek out religious spokespeople, cultivate multiracial alliances and trade diatribe for discipline so as to use Falwell's polarizing statements to gain moderate supporters.
By speaking about gay people as outsiders, and even as disease-bearing strangers, he forced many Christians to look honestly at their congregations and reexamine the premise of their faith. By casting gays as threats to the survival of families, he forced parents, siblings and relatives of all kinds to reassess what values bind them together and how they care for one another. By approaching the law, especially in privacy and civil rights, as a battleground for competing visions of righteousness, he goaded a generation of scholars and activists to talk not simply in terms of precedents and entitlements but ever more persuasively in terms of conscience, morality and fairness.
To put it in Hegelian terms, Falwell's thesis - that gays are evil - led to an antithesis - a powerful gay rights movement - which ultimately resulted in a synthesis - American tolerance of homosexuals, even civil unions and gay marriage. Certainly not the results Jerry Falwell wanted when he screamed about gays coming to convert our children to their "lifestyle." Or to put it in (pop) theological terms, perhaps it's simply that "God works in mysterious ways!" :)
But as this article certainly demonstrates the teaching in the Bible, "Out of Evil There will be Goodness", certainly portrays how the Power in this Universe Governs and Guides.
It's sort of hard not to detest them. The whole rise of Falwell, LU, Thomas Road Baptist Church and it's subsequent influx of religious right followers to Lynchburg has changed the city forever ( for the worse I think).
Fred Phelps ( God hates fags) will be here at Jerry's funeral to protest Jerry since he professed his love for everyone ( including gays) and one of LU's professors wrote a column in The News and Advance about Phelps today...interesting article for sure.
The newspaper has been glowing about all the good Jerry has done. Very little if any negative comments. I for one am just waiting for the whole thing to die down. I am sick of Jerry...sick of him. I am not happy when anyone dies but the long, drawn out eulogies, funeral, graduation and NOW an eternal flame that will be built on the mountain is just overwhelming.
Bury him and move on.
Starting at about 2:18. Warning: not for the "politically correct," especially the easily offended right wing "politically correct."
Al Mr. Pitts said it was his finest hour...but the entire story is not well known.