A Hollow Eulogy for Jerry Falwell

I didn't say anything when Jerry Falwell died. There was a time to let his family grieve, to let his victims reflect on their pain, and that was a time to be quiet, it seemed to me.

The Wall of Separation is a blog put up by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It's a thoughtful site, not the place for ranting and hasty judgments, a site that reports on and analyzes a powerful and dangerous trend in our contemporary American society. So it was interesting yesterday to see how they reacted when the White House sent a guy to Falwell's funeral to say what a "friend of the administration" Falwell had been:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell’s funeral was yesterday and, predictably, President George W. Bush sent a representative. Tim Goeglein, White House liaison to religious groups, stepped into the pulpit of Thomas Road Baptist Church and praised Falwell as a visionary.

As the Associated Press reported, “The White House sent Tim Goeglein, its liaison to religious groups. He called Falwell a ‘great friend of the administration’ and told mourners that Falwell had trained young people now serving in the Bush administration – ‘so a man of great vision has seen a vision fulfilled.’”

A man of “great vision”? What vision might that be? Falwell’s vision was one of an officially “Christian America” – Christian by his narrow definition of that faith, of course. His “vision” would have excluded not only Americans who happened to be Jews, atheists, Muslims, Buddhists and other non-Christians but also millions of Americans whose Christian faith is less rigid.

Is Falwell’s great “vision” his legacy of ugly gay bashing and his crude personal attacks on anyone who dared to stand up to his narrow-mindedness? Perhaps the “vision” the White House celebrates is Falwell’s constant attacks on the great constitutional principle of church-state separation (which he repeatedly said was a lie and a myth) or his often-stated desire to tear down the public schools.

But maybe the “vision” Goeglein celebrates is the one Falwell outlined two days after Sept. 1, 2001. With the wounds of that horrific attack still fresh, Falwell went on national television to blame the mass killings of nearly 3,000 people not on the evil terrorists who executed it but on Americans who disagree with him on political issues.

It’s worth recalling exactly what he said: “The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this. And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gys 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. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

The misery that this one man generated in the world is immeasurable. He was no friend of America. Our elected government has no business sending somebody to his funeral, saying what a wonderful "friend" he was.