Jerry Falwell’s Legacy of Hate

To the Back of the Bus, Please

Great men of God like Jerry Falwell notoriously blame floods and fires on the Lord’s wrath over women who want to work. It seems God doesn’t have time to punish big sins like slavery, pollution, greed, genocide, war, racism, violence, or child brothels when homos are brainwashing our kids with cartoons like Spongebob and the Teletubbies.

Falwell, cofounder of the Moral Majority, says the call for Christian conservatism was ignited when abortion was legalized. That’s when fags and feminism took over our Christian heritage. These groups couldn’t be called minorities, like God-ordained groups of real humans like blacks and Hispanics, Falwell said, because these were fake lifestyles of sin that rejected Biblical patriarchy.

The Nation’s Max Blumenthal writes that Falwell’s recollection is revisionist, for his mission was built long before gay rights were born. Falwell’s early church, built in a “backwater bottling plant,” was built on “rabid” segregationalism.

Falwell was born in 1933 to a bootlegger, and after college, he started a church in Virginia. The big issue facing Christians in 1956 was that Christian schools were weeding out separatism. White-only schools were losing tax-exempt status, and Falwell didn’t like this one bit...........