We come to bury Jerry, not to praise him

By the time I started to get into politics Jerry Falwell had already become a foot note. As a matter of fact many of his obits correctly link his time of political power as during the Reagan administration. Although the revisionist liberals claim he got Reagan elected, the truth is Carter had a zero percent chance of being re-elected.

One area where Jerry succeeded was perfecting the liberal's tactic of boycotting. He organized his group of supporters, and took his case to the Christian churches, who rallied their members to write to manufacturers threatening boycotts of their products. This got the left's collective panties in a bunch. Thier primary method of harrassment and intimidation was usurped (and overshadowed) by the Moral Majority. Where a successful letter writing campaign for the left might generate a few thousand letters, Rev Falwell was able to mobilize a hundred thousand.


Fast forward to the 2004 election. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth came out and questioned John Kerry's accounts of his participation in the war. They were funded by various PACs and independent donors. The left was pissed again, creating groups to smear political opponents was their domain. The liberals decried the SBVT and their dirty tactics, despite the fact that the MoveOn was doing the same thing, but with much more money involved. I am not meaning to draw a correllation between Rev Falwell and the SBVT. But what I am saying is that the right copied the lefts tactics and outdid them in the 1980s and in 2004, more efficiently and with less money they beat the liberals at their game.


That is one of the reasons Jerry Falwell is hated by the left. He outplayed them at their own game. His time of political relavence was short, but he was feared and hated by the left. And that is why we saw such an overwhelming display or the hypocrites gloating and celebrating with glee over the news of Rev Falwell's passing. The media built him up to mythical proportions, trying to convince everyone that Christians are evil to try to marginalize the man. The media protrays the Christian Right as a source of evil, out of step with the modern USA, but truth be told 80% of the country identifies with the ideals of christianity and patriotism that Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority held dear.

But Jerry Falwell was not evil, but he did say a lot of controversial things. Things that "enlightened" people deemed intolerent. He preached conservative beliefs and Christianity. He was not a hypocrite, he said what he believed. He did not attack or judge others, except when they espoused views he found were anti-Christian. Politically, he supported those who held similar beliefs, similarly, he withheld support from people who ran Republican but who did not share his conservative beliefs.

He was not ashamed to be against open homosexuality as he saw it as being against his religious beliefs. Earlier in his career he was pro-segregation, as most white southern men were, but his ideas changed with the times, as it did for many other people.