Falwell's legacy: faith, hate or Teletubbies?

[DeepModem Mom]

CNN: Falwell's legacy: faith, hate or Teletubbies?
May 16, 2007
By Jonathan Mandell
CNN


Samantha Krieger is shown with Jerry Falwell, who officiated at her wedding. She says the evangelist "was a great leader and hero." Others differ about his legacy.

(CNN) -- "When I have children one day," Samantha Krieger of Dallas, Texas, wrote to CNN.com, "they will know of the legacy that Dr. Jerry Falwell left."

But what will that legacy be?

To Krieger, who had personal connections to Falwell -- she attended the college he founded; he officiated at her wedding; her husband was his nurse -- the evangelist "was a great leader and hero."

Victoria Kidd of Winchester, Virginia, believes the exact opposite: "The damage he has done to the Christian faith is immeasurable," she wrote to CNN.com

Others would prefer to think that he has no legacy at all.

"He should be erased from every history book and media story," wrote Brian Pippinger of St. Petersburg, Florida.

Jerry Falwell was the evangelical minister who founded the Moral Majority, the Christian right political movement, in 1980. He died Tuesday at age 73, and it's clear from the differing assessments of his legacy that he was a controversial figure.

Matt Foreman, head of the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force, calls Falwell "a founder and leader of America's anti-gay industry. His lasting legacy will be the polarization of the American electorate and the rise of Christian evangelicals as a political force in American politics."...

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Many now remember him most for outrageous statements he made after leaving the Moral Majority -- in 1999, his house organ the National Liberty Journal warned parents that the Tinky Winky TV character was secretly gay and morally dangerous; in 2001, he blamed the September 11 terrorist attack on "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."...

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/15/falwell.legacy/index.html

[mike_c]

1. legacy? 25 years from now no one will remember who he was....

eom

[wtmusic]

2. A legacy of fear

Fear as a motivator, fear as a political instrument, fear as a policy shaper.