“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 gays 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.’”
-Jerry Falwell, on the events of September 11, 2001
I came home today, and, as I do every day, I went and got the mail. Recently, I have been receiving an awful lot of mail from a certain Liberty University somewhere in Pennsylvania. Apparently, they are giving away a Jeep Liberty to one lucky incoming freshman. I gazed at this strange piece of literature sitting at my table with Jeep Liberty on the front, and the headline “Liberty Gazette” printed boldly at the top of the page. This, I assumed, was some sort of newsletter from some college trying to solicit my attendance by offering me the shot at this Jeep. Upon further investigation of the sender of this strange sweepstakes entry/college application, I stumbled upon a picture of Jerry Falwell on the inside cover beneath the title “Our Founder and President.” Now I have two reasons for hating Jerry Falwell. The first and most obvious reason is that he is Jerry Falwell. The second reason is that he is trying to recruit me using a Jeep Liberty as bait to attend his fundamentalist training camp.
Another reason for my general dislike of Jerry Falwell is that he said, in the aftermath of 9/11, that God had allowed the attack to punish us for our tolerance of gays and lesbians in America. Sometimes I wonder if we should require a license in order for a person to exercise his right of freedom of speech. After making that statement, Falwell went on to claim that Islam, by its very nature, is an evil religion, and must be stopped. Newsflash, Mr. Falwell: they worship the same God Christains do. And we wonder why everyone in the Middle East hates us. Every state-owned, anti-American propaganda media agency from Iraq to Syria is going to take that quote and print it on the front page of their newspapers and distribute them throughout the region. That is the view of America those people will get. No wonder they want to turn this whole Iraq thing into a holy war. They honestly believe that we are out to wipe them out. I am not arguing that we should all bite our tongues in hopes that we don’t accidentally offend someone’s religious beliefs, but come on Mr. Falwell, do we really need to give them that kind of propaganda ammunition? Although I’m convinced that the media agencies in that part of the world would print up false quotes anyway in order to better their cause, we should at least make them work for their mudslinging.
This brand of American fundamentalism is giving America a bad name. Most Christians and most Muslims are in no way interested in fighting a holy war against each other, yet both religions have their sects of lunatics that would hijack their own religion to wage war against another. Osama Bin Laden is guilty of this, and so is Jerry Falwell.
Mr. Falwell’s branding of 9/11 as the Wrath of God upon an unholy and over-tolerant culture is sheer madness. His rhetoric is reckless and destructive. He and Bin Laden have more in common than they do differences.
No, Mr. Falwell, I do not want your Jeep, and I do not want to join your cult. Perhaps our tolerance of idiots like you has in fact incurred God’s wrath upon our soil.