Jerry Falwell died at age 73

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LYNCHBURG, Va. - The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the television evangelist who founded the Moral Majority and used it to mold the religious right into a political force, died Tuesday shortly after being found unconscious in his office at Liberty University, a school executive said. He was 73.Ron Godwin, the university's executive vice president, said Falwell, 73, was found unresponsive around 10:45 a.m. and taken to Lynchburg General Hospital. "CPR efforts were unsuccessful," he said.Godwin said he was not sure what caused the collapse, but he said Falwell "has a history of heart challenges.""I had breakfast with him, and he was fine at breakfast," Godwin said. "He went to his office, I went to mine, and they found him unresponsive."Falwell had survived two serious health scares in early 2005. He was hospitalized for two weeks with what was described as a viral infection, then was hospitalized again a few weeks later after going into respiratory arrest. Later that year, doctors found a 70 percent blockage in an artery, which they opened with stents.Falwell credited his Moral Majority with getting millions of conservative voters registered, electing Ronald Reagan and giving Republicans Senate control in 1980."I shudder to think where the country would be right now if the religious right had not evolved," Falwell said when he stepped down as Moral Majority president in 1987.The fundamentalist church that Falwell started in an abandoned bottling plant in 1956 grew into a religious empire that includes the 22,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church, the "Old Time Gospel Hour" carried on television stations around the country and 7,700-student Liberty University. He built Christian elementary schools, homes for unwed mothers and a home for alcoholics.He also founded Liberty University in Lynchburg, which began as Lynchburg Baptist College in 1971.Liberty University's commencement is scheduled for Saturday, with former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich as the featured speaker.In 2006, Falwell marked the 50th anniversary of his church and spoke out on stem cell research, saying he sympathized with people with medical problems, but that any medical research must pass a three-part test: "Is it ethically correct? Is it biblically correct? Is it morally correct?"Falwell had once opposed mixing preaching with politics, but he changed his view and in 1979, founded the Moral Majority. The political lobbying organization grew to 6.5 million members and raised $69 million as it supported conservative politicians and campaigned against abortion, homosexuality, pornography and bans on school prayer.Falwell became the face of the religious right, appearing on national magazine covers and on television talk shows. In 1983, U.S. News & World Report named him one of 25 most influential people in America.In 1984, he sued Hustler magazine for $45 million, charging that he was libeled by an ad parody depicting him as an incestuous drunkard. A federal jury found the fake ad did not libel him, but awarded him $200,000 for emotional distress. That verdict was overturned, however, in a landmark 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision that held that even pornographic spoofs about a public figure enjoy First Amendment protection.The case was depicted in the 1996 movie "The People v. Larry Flynt."With Falwell's high profile came frequent criticism, even from fellow ministers. The Rev. Billy Graham once rebuked him for political sermonizing on "non-moral issues."Falwell quit the Moral Majority in 1987, saying he was tired of being "a lightning rod" and wanted to devote his time to his ministry and Liberty University. But he remained outspoken and continued to draw criticism for his remarks.Days after Sept. 11, 2001, Falwell essentially blamed feminists, gays, lesbians and liberal groups for bringing on the terrorist attacks. He later apologized. In 1999, he told an evangelical conference that the Antichrist was a male Jew who was probably already alive. Falwell later apologized for the remark but not for holding the belief. A month later, his National Liberty Journal warned parents that Tinky Winky, a purple, purse-toting character on television's "Teletubbies" show, was a gay role model and morally damaging to children. Falwell was re-energized after family values proved important in the 2004 presidential election. He formed the Faith and Values Coalition as the "21st Century resurrection of the Moral Majority," to seek anti-abortion judges, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and more conservative elected officials. The big, blue-eyed preacher with a booming voice started his independent Baptist church with 35 members. From his living room, he began broadcasting his message of salvation and raising the donations that helped his ministry grow. "He was one of the first to come up with ways to use television to expand his ministry," said Robert Alley, a retired University of Richmond religion professor who studied and criticized Falwell's career. In 1987, Falwell took over the PTL (Praise the Lord) ministry in South Carolina after Jim Bakker's troubles. Falwell slid fully clothed down a theme park water slide after donors met his fund-raising goal to help rescue the rival ministry. He gave it up seven months later after learning the depth of PTL's financial problems. Largely because of the Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals, donations to Falwell's ministry dropped from $135 million in 1986 to less than $100 million the following year. Hundreds of workers were laid off and viewers of his television show dwindled. Liberty University was $73 million in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy, and his "Old Time Gospel Hour" was $16 million in debt. By the mid-1990s, two local businessmen with long ties to Falwell began overseeing the finances and helped get companies to forgive debts or write them of as losses. Falwell devoted much of his time keeping his university afloat. He dreamed that Liberty would grow to 50,000 students and be to fundamentalist Christians what Notre Dame is to Roman Catholics and Brigham Young University is to Mormons. He was an avid sports fan who arrived at Liberty basketball games to the cheers of students. Falwell's father and his grandfather were militant atheists, he wrote in his autobiography. He said his father made a fortune off his businesses — including bootleging during Prohibition. As a student, Falwell was a star athlete and a prankster who was barred from giving his high school valedictorian's speech after he was caught using counterfeit lunch tickets his senior year. He ran with a gang of juvenile delinquents before becoming a born-again Christian at age 19. He turned down an offer to play professional baseball and transferred from Lynchburg College to Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo. "My heart was burning to serve Christ," he once said in an interview. "I knew nothing would ever be the same again." Falwell is survived by his wife, Macel, and three children, Jerry, Jonathan and Jeannie.

I dunno.. call me mean or whatever but I for one am not overly saddened by the news what-so-ever. Maybe people will picket his funeral like he did at Matthew Shepherds....

Yeah, I was more upset over Anna-Nicole.

Exactly...A friend just send me a list of some quotes from Jerry Falwell. Just reading them lets you know how insane and full of hate this man was.--------------------------------------------If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being.This is probably as bad a day as the court has had on social issues since "Roe v Wade.-- Rev Jerry Falwell, reacting to the Supreme Court's ruling in the Texas sodomy case, "Lawrence v. Texas," wherein the high court upheld an individual's (or a couple's) right to privacy; "It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter," said Justice Anthony M Kennedy, for the majority in an opinion "as broad in its constitutional vision as any ever issued by the court," wrote Charles Lane for The Washington Post; in his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia, an extremist Evangelical Christian, complained that the justices voting to uphold the right to privacy were creating a new constitutional right, that they were not upholding the Constitution, quoted from "Planned Parenthood Federal Action Report" (July, 2003) ††I had a student ask me, "Could the savior you believe in save Osama bin Laden?" Of course, we know the blood of Jesus Christ can save him, and then he must be executed.God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this.-- Rev Jerry Falwell, blaming civil libertarians for the terrorist attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, to which Rev Pat Robertson again agreed, quoted from AANEWS #958 by American Atheists (September 14, 2001)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." I sincerely believe that the collective efforts of many secularists during the past generation, resulting in the expulsion from our schools and from the public square, has left us vulnerable.I put all the blame legally and morally on the actions of the terrorist, secular and anti-Christian environment left us open to our Lord's not to protect. When a nation deserts God and expels God from the culture ... the result is not good.Pat, did you notice yesterday the ACLU, and all the Christ-haters, People For the American Way, NOW, etc. were totally disregarded by the Democrats and the Republicans in both houses of Congress as they went out on the steps and called out on to God in prayer and sang "God Bless America" and said "let the ACLU be hanged"? In other words, when the nation is on its knees, the only normal and natural and spiritual thing to do is what we ought to be doing all the time -- calling upon God.I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be! AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.If we are going to save America and evangelize the world, we cannot accommodate secular philosophies that are diametrically opposed to Christian truth ... We need to pull out all the stops to recruit and train 25 million Americans to become informed pro-moral activists whose voices can be heard in the halls of Congress.I am convinced that America can be turned around if we will all get serious about the Master's business. It may be late, but it is never too late to do what is right. We need an old-fashioned, God-honoring, Christ-exalting revival to turn American back to God. America can be saved!It appears that America's anti-Biblical feminist movement is at last dying, thank God, and is possibly being replaced by a Christ-centered men's movement which may become the foundation for a desperately needed national spiritual awakening.There is no separation of church and state. Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution.The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible,without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc. But these things speak evil of those things, verse 10 which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves. Look at the Metropolitan Community Church today, the gay church, almost accepted into the World Council of Churches. Almost, the vote was against them. But they will try again and again until they get in, and the tragedy is that they would get one vote. Because they are spoken of here in Jude as being brute beasts, that is going to the baser lust of the flesh to live immorally, and so Jude describes this as apostasy. But thank God this vile and satanic system will one day be utterly annihilated and there'll be a celebration in heaven.The Jews are returning to their land of unbelief. They are spiritually blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior.Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them.I do not believe the homosexual community deserves minority status. One's misbehavior does not qualify him or her for minority status. Blacks, Hispanics, women, etc., are God-ordained minorities who do indeed deserve minority status.Dan Moldea, the lead investigator for Larry Flynt's ongoing quest to uncover sexual indiscretions of Republican congressional members, has now admitted he was hired by the law firm defending President Clinton.-- Rev Jerry Falwell, from "The Bizarre Flynt-Clinton Connection," in the January 15, 1999, "Falwell Confidential" fax report to 162,000 members, referring to the firm Williams & Connolly. Dan Moldea responded, "This entire statement is false and misleading, reckless and malicious. It is a complete fabrication." However, the San Diego Union-Tribune picked up the fabrication and ran it as fact. Quoted from The Religious Freedom Coalition, "The Two faces of Jerry Falwell." We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism ... we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today ... our battle is with Satan himself.Billy Graham is the chief servant of Satan.AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah's chariotters.You'll be riding along in an automobile. You'll be the driver perhaps. You're a Christian. There'll be several people in the automobile with you, maybe someone who is not a Christian. When the trumpet sounds you and the other born-again believers in that automobile will be instantly caught away -- you will disappear, leaving behind only your clothes and physical things that cannot inherit eternal life. That unsaved person or persons in the automobile will suddenly be startled to find the car suddenly somewhere crashes.... Other cars on the highway driven by believers will suddenly be out of control and stark pandemonium will occur on ... every highway in the world where Christians are caught away from the drivers wheel.

Well he doesn't sound like a very nice man. Atleast now he is in heaven where there are no gays or abortionists, and, according to the Pope, all the aborted babies who have spent the past few hundred years in the now non-existant Limbo. Good for him!

Eeek, the man was a galloping asshole! He was deranged and dangerous, and what's terriifying, is that people in the US followed and believed him. Sounds like he got into too much of his father's illegal whiskey and it poisened his mind. Sick!

good fucking riddence

I was really hoping no one would bring this up, but I knew better.Yeah, the guy could be a real prick sometimes, and sometimes seemed to glory in being a prick. But, once again, I can't see rejoicing (or simply joicing) in his death. He did have value beyond his public stupidity, and left behind a family that's heartbroken.There I go, being all sensitive again.Hell, I would even be a little sad if Al Sharpton kicked over.

PARTY AT MY PLACE!!!

I generally get a little spring in my step when someone that spreads ignorance and intolerance dies.His dying was a good thing for America, you can't deny that.

Maybe I can.
But it's pointless.
You wanna be crass and callous, be my guest.
I'll still dig you tomorrow.

I feel bad for his family, they have my sympathy. But I get to know my kid will grow up in a Falwell free country. Sure, there will be someone else to take his place, but by then I might be back in Israel, where the most those religious extremists do is go pray at the western wall.His family shouldn't be... punished? for him, and they have my sympathy. He, however, does not.

Quote:Former president Jimmy Carter, a Baptist, once said that, speaking as a Christian, “Falwell can go straight to hell”.

I'm sure you held out hope that Falwell would renounce his own hateful views to make the world a better place but, unfortunatly, he died insted.Same result though.

"If all the Falwells of the world died and people could believe, or chose to not believe, in a god or diety of their choice, people wouldn't know what to do with themselves. It's almost like the human mind needs some amount of hate in them to continue to live. We live to hate the Falwells, and then live to hate us. I have no use for hate." - My fella

Originally Posted By: Joan GarryMy partner just emailed me. Jerry Falwell died, she said. Such a rush of emotion. And then questions. Does he have a number 2? Who will succeed him? But Scout asked the best question. I just yelled into the kitchen to tell her. She yelled back. "I wonder where he's headed now..."I learned a lot from Jerry Falwell. I debated him on television a number of times. He taught me not to take a breath at the end of my sentences but to grab catch breaths in mid-sentence. That way, the interviewer has a tougher time interrupting. I learned that when you have a title like Reverend, you get some sort of free pass. A free pass to say terrible things and get away with it.But most importantly I learned that you only get a free pass if people are willing to give it to you. You only get power when people are prepared to relinquish it. You only get a platform when people offer it to you.As a woman, I have a lot of anger toward Jerry Falwell. I would never have an abortion but believe that a woman has a right to choose. As a gay person, I have a lot of anger toward Jerry Falwell. He raised a good deal of money for his cause, for his "church" on my back. As a Christian, I have a lot of anger toward Jerry Falwell. He used his deeply held religious beliefs as cover for the vast array of statements he made through the years that will reverberate for decades to come.But as I watch CNN this afternoon (I can't bear to watch Fox), I realize the anger I feel should be directed to all those Mr. Falwell leaves behind -- all of you who created this demagogue. To all those who booked him on a TV or radio show, to all those who put money in his coffers, to all of you who followed him blindly. You gave Falwell the opportunity, the platform, the microphone and the money. He couldn't have done it all without you.The world lost a powerful bigot today. The question ahead is not who will take his place. Someone will. The question is did you learn anything? Will you recognize that with power comes responsibility. When the next one asks for money or a microphone, maybe you'll think twice. Maybe you'll consider what it really means to be Christian."Showing qualities such as kindness, helpfulness, and concern for others."From the Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joan-garry-/what-jerry-falwell-taught_b_48538.htmlI think she very much described my feelings towards Falwell, and all the people that let him get as high as he got. So, Did you learn anything?

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I think she very much described my feelings towards Falwell, and all the people that let him get as high as he got.

VERY much so!! She described how I feel to a "T".

And Damien I know what you are saying and I feel for his family because it's never easy to lose a loved one. But on the same token I cannot say I am sad that he died, he was a very hurtful man who spread so much hate.

Inthat case youll be very sad to know what I think about the BeeGees...3 down 1 to go

Yes...yes...Jerry Falwell...now HE was absolutely the biggest threat to humanity this country has ever seen!And Chance, there were only ever 3 Bee Gees.You must've been thinking of Brother Andy.

Originally Posted By: damien

Yes...yes...Jerry Falwell...now HE was absolutely the biggest threat to humanity this country has ever seen!

I didn't say that, but..... nevermind