Farewell Falwell

Upon just hearing the news of Falwell's death, my mind reviewed some of the unseemly things I remembered about him - nothing positive among them.

Here is what I remembered:-

He was a staunch segregationist who supported hate icons like Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Strom Thurmond and others; Called the Civil Rights movement for justice, the 'civil wrongs' movement; Smeared and libeled Martin Luther King; He and other racists of his time - including J. Edgar Hoover, publicly gloated when Martin Luther King was assassinated; Financed a movie that falsely alleged Ron Brown and Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster; Supported the evil system of South African apartheid and recommended that his congregants buy the South African Krugerrand to help support that immoral, murderous regime; Falsely attributed national disasters like 9-11, Katrina etc., to gays and pagans whom God was punishing; Called Liberals and public schools satanic; Claimed to be a Christian, yet exhibited the most un-Christlike views and actions; Instituted and sponsored a thinly-veiled curriculum of racial hatred and bigotry at his university when he started it in the early 1970s; Supported Israel's claims that the lands of Palestine belonged to them, and turned a blind eye and refused to criticize their inhumane treatment and dispossession of the Palestinians who they found on the land; Started an organization called the 'Moral Majority', that was neither moral nor a majority; Blasphemed by falsely claiming to speak for God on numerous occasions; Never missed an opportunity to disparage the poor and less fortunate of our country; Lastly, he conflated his extremist religiosity with his right-wing politics to the ultimate detriment of our country.

Fox news and others, will doubtlessly try to venerate, canonize and deify him, and they will be tripping over themselves trying to burnish his image, but no amount of trying will alter the despicable record he has left behind.

What I remember, is only a fraction of the sorry misdeeds in his life that he will have to answer for in the next one. I did not wish him dead, but I'm grateful that he will not be drawing any more breaths to heap more abuse on the humans he despised while he was here. Pat Robertson is his evil-twin and his spiritual and political soul-mate, (Pat publicly called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez) - maybe he can repent and save himself from Falwell's fate while he still is alive and breathing.

In my view, the world is better off without him.