Rev. Jerry Falwell (1933-2007) For many fortysomething lesbians and gay men, the late Reverend Jerry Falwell, who died yesterday, was a loathsome figure who presided over the rise of our nemesis, the US Christian Right. However, feelings aside, here is a brief account of his life. Born in 1933, Falwell never attended university, but graduated from Virginia's Baptist Bible College as a minister in 1955, and founded Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1956. While there, he also used the emerging medium of television to spread his fundamentalist message through the Old Time Gospel Hour, which never screened here in New Zealand. He was to become one of the first televangelists, amassing considerable personal wealth from his merchandising and associated products, and opening his fundamentalist "Liberty University" in 1971. In 1979, he founded one of the inaugural US Christian Right groups, the Moral Majority. (Despite the use of the term to designate similar New Zealand Christian Right organisations, as noted above, Falwell's programme never aired on New Zealand television, nor were his books well-distributed within New Zealand's fundamentalist bookshops. He never visited New Zealand in person, and neither he nor the Moral Majority were actively involved in solidarity work with New Zealand antigay groups during their campaign against homosexual law reform here. He did debate then- New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange at Oxford University over the morality of nuclear weapons in 1985, but that appears to be the sum total of his hands on concern with our country). Even before he established the Moral Majority, though, Falwell's political leanings were decidedly right-wing. In the fifties, the Old Time Gospel Hour was a staunch opponent of African-American civil rights and he would often invite segregationist politicians onto his programme. To his credit, however, he later admitted he was wrong some time later, but this didn't stop him from similarly opposing sanctions against South African apartheid and casting aspersions on the heroic then-Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, Desmond Tutu, during the eighties. The Moral Majority and associated televangelists took credit for the election of Ronald Reagan, and used their newfound influence in the Republican Party to attempt to criminalise abortion and maintain criminal penalties for homosexuality. Many US LGBT activists blame the US Christian Right for creating the atmosphere of neglect and closetry that caused the escalating US HIV/AIDS epidemic in the eighties through failure to assist gay men's HIV/AIDS prevention and safe sex initiatives in that country. As Reagan prepared for retirement in 1988, Falwell became embroiled in a fellow televangelist's downfall, when it was found that Jim Bakker's Praise the Lord Ministries had problems with financial fraud. Bakker's ex-wife, Tammy Faye and her current husband, charge that Falwell engaged in a hostile takeover and used it to asset strip PTL. Falwell denied this, laying the blame for PTL's downfall on Jim Bakker's financial mismanagement and fraudulent misdealing. After Bill Clinton was elected US President in 1992, Falwell offered his media production skills to a right-wing anti-Clinton pressure group, Citizens for Honest Government, and helped produce a conspiracy theory video entitled The Clinton Chronicles, which made questionable attributions about the former Governor of Arkansas and business interests in that state. He also attacked public education and was a tiresome critic of LGBT rights. (Amusingly though, he was forced to pay overseven thousand dollars damages after a debate in which he denied that he'd ever called the LGBT Metropolitan Community Churches "brute beasts" and a "satanic network." In 1984, gay activist Jerry Sloane provided a tape of him doing just that. Falwell was fined $US7875 for failing to pay up when he welched on a promise to pay out if it was found he'd fibbed). In his later years, Falwell's positions inspired either hilarity or outrage. He denounced the BBC Teletubbies character Tinky Winky for being purple, having a triangular antenna and having a handbag in his National Liberty Journal in the late nineties, which meant that the children's educational character 'must' be a 'gay icon.' However, in 2001, he made grossly offensive and insensitive remarks about the September 11 Twin Towers tragedy, fulminating that pagans, gays, the pro-choice movement, feminists and secularists were responsible for undermining American morality, so that a vengeful deity had no choice but to send al Qaeda to show the errant nation its folly. After suffering long-term cardiovascular and respiratory problems, Falwell was found unconscious in his Liberty University offices and died at Lynchburg General Hospital from cardiac arrest on May 15, 2007. Did he have any influence here in New Zealand? If so, it wasn't direct, for it was to be twenty years before Brian Tamaki and Peter Mortlock became infamous as our domestic televangelists. Thankfully, too, broadcast television content regulation here is far more stringent, as is credentialing for institutions of higher education. As for the New Zealand Christian Right, it may have been distantly inspired by his work, but it has never been able to emulate the political success of its parent movement in the United States. on any issue apart from opposition to voluntary euthanasia. Falwell will be mourned by many of his coreligionists, but I suspect few members of the US LGBT communities will join them. Recommended: Susan Harding: The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics: Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2000. David Snowball: Continuity and Change in the Rhetoric of the Moral Majority: New York: Praeger: 1991. Craig Young - 17th May 2007