The Rev. Jerry Falwell died at the age of 73 of apparent heart disease on May 15. He came to prominence though the Moral Majority, a conservative religious-political group that he founded in 1979. Opposition to gays and lesbians was a cornerstone of the group's activities.
He was perhaps the single person most responsible for making religious conservatives the political force that they are today. The Moral Majority represented a shift among fundamentalists from an inner direction to active engagement in the political process.
Falwell referred to gays as 'deviants' and 'sodomites,' and played a leading role in the backlash against the first wave of gay rights legislation. He joined Anita Bryant in 1977 to repeal an equal rights law in Miami, and participated in a similar effort in California the following year.
Over the course of his public life, Falwell devolved from the effective political power who had played a significant role in the election of Ronald Reagan as Preisdent, to the absurdity of his 1999 warning to parents that the Telebubbie Tinky Winky was a subversive part of the homosexual agenda. 'He is purple—the gay pride color, and his antenna is shaped like a triangle—the gay pride symbol,' said Falwell, according to the Wikipedia Web site.
Rev. Mel White worked as a writer for Falwell before coming to terms with his own homosexuality and confronting Falwell on his homophobia through the organization Soulforce. White said, 'It breaks my heart to think that Jerry died without ever discovering the truth about God's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children. I sincerely hope that one day his school and his church will have a change of heart.'
While expressing condolences to the family, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force executive director Matt Foreman said, 'Unfortunately, we will always remember him as a founder and leader of Americas' antigay industry, someone who exacerbated the nation's appalling response to the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, someone who demonized and vilified us for political gain, and someone who used religion to divide rather than unite our nation.'
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation ( GLAAD ) advised the media of Falwell's 'history of denigrative comments' on gays and urged it to 'reflect on the outdated attitudes and beliefs he embodied.'
The popular blog Wonkette, the D.C. gossip, was positively vitriolic, writing, 'At a time like this, people deserve sympathy and good wishes…except for Falwell, who was an evil sonofabitch. Over his long career as a vile televangelist building an empire of bigotry from the donations of poor people, Falwell has supported South African apartheid, called AIDS an invention of Jesus to punish gays, attacked Martin Luther King and U.S. civil rights, and blamed 9/11 on feminists and homosexuals.'
