When is McCain going to disown Falwell?

26 comments April 30th, 2008

I don’t mean to dance on the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s grave, but I have to wonder why John McCain has yet to explain exactly why he embraced the infamous TV preacher when it was widely known that Falwell had blamed America for Sept. 11 (a verbatim reminder of which is PROVIDED by Chuck Sweeny this morning on his blog).

When McCain first ran for president back in 2000 as a maverick Republican who suffered fools badly, he denounced Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance” and faulted George W. Bush for being too friendly with them.

But as the saying goes, that was then, and this is now. When McCain decided to run for president again this year, he cast himself as less a maverick and more a reliably conservative Republican.  Accordingly, he made up with Falwell and Robertson and even deigned to deliver the commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University (see photo above).

This was despite Falwell’s well-known record of outrageous utterances, not the least outrageous of which was the aforementioned blaming of America for 9/11.

Here are few others:

Back in the ’80s, after Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith told a Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” Falwell offered an identical view. “I do not believe,” he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.”

Also in the ’80s, Falwell lost a lawsuit that stemmed from his having condemned the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Churches as “brute beasts” and “a vile and Satanic system” that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” His attorney, without any disagreement from Falwell,  said the Jewish judge in the case was prejudiced against Christians.

In 1993, despite his promise to Jewish groups to stop referring to America as a “Christian nation,” Falwell gave a sermon in which he said, “We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”

In 1999, Falwell told a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., that the Antichrist prophesied in the Bible is alive today and “of course he’ll be Jewish.”

John McCain has never renounced, rejected or disowned these and countless other bigoted statements made by Falwell — at least not since he decided that the road to the Republican presidential nomination ran through the precincts of the Religious Right.

Nor have the media made nearly the fuss over McCain’s relationship with Falwell (and other such crackpots) as they have over Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?

Falwell’s dead now, but his hateful legacy lives on. And John McCain says nothing about its poisonous effect on America.