The Stuff the Eulogies Don't Mention

I'm not going to eulogize Jerry Falwell here, but I do want to draw a connection. (Actually, I'm not doing the drawing -- I'm just allowing you to see the connections that were there that others have pointed out.)

First, Mark Graber at Balkinization:

The main issue, of course, was racial segregation. For more than a decade, Falwell rose to power by preaching that Brown v. Board of Education, related judicial decisions, and anti-discrimination laws were abominations to the Lord. The heart of social conservatism in America is a set of religious schools founded in the late 1950s and 1960s, and their original purpose was not to ensure students would not be enticed by the prospect of gay marriage. Contemporary social conservatives have, with a good deal of media cooperation, attempted to bury this history. Popular revisionist histories pretend that the Moral Majority was created "ex nihilo" the day Roe v. Wade was decided. This is false. A religious political movement was already on the ground, and that movement had previously been dedicated to a the losing struggle to maintain Jim Crow.

Graber gets some back-up from Sara Robinson at Orcinus:

The Moral Majority was initiated as a result of a struggle for control of an American conservative Christian advocacy group known as Christian Voice during 1978. During a news conference by Christian Voice's founder, Robert Grant, he claimed that the Religious Right was a "sham... controlled by three Catholics and a Jew." Paul Weyrich, Terry Dolan, Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips left Christian Voice. During a 1979 meeting, they urged televangelist Jerry Falwell to found Moral Majority. This was also the beginning of the New Christian Right.

Anyone who still wonders if there's racism at work in the religious right should ponder the fact that they had to throw "three Catholics and a Jew" overboard just to get the Moral Majority out of the dock.

I bring this up because of the increasing openness of racism and religioius intolerance on the right. I've noted it here and here. It's not such a far leap, when your history is one of bigotry, to just pick up on the latest "threat" and run with it. Since we have ample evidence that Falwell was a racist and religiously intolerant (and I have to point out that I'm not really sure that he believed in any of it, or anything else except his own manifest destinty), it's no real surprise that he could blame 9/11 on gays. It's actually only another facet of a well established pattern of open bias that goes back to his beginnings. This is, of course, all being swept under the carpet by his apologists, since they share the same viewpoint and it's not good PR.

By the way, I think you can probably substitute "Robertson," "Dobson," "Malkin," "Limbaugh," and a few other names for "Falwell" and still have a pretty accurate history -- in the latter two cases, just substitute "radio" for "church."