The Infinitely Complexly Stupid Rev. Falwell

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Ed Tyler wrote:

>

> Y'all just gotta read this:

<snip>

>               ROANOKE, Va. -- Rev. Jerry Falwell's newspaper,

>               which previously claimed that a popular "Teletubbies"

>               character is a gay role model, asserts the all-female Lilith

>               Fair concert tour is named for a demon.

<snipped>

RevGaud
Keep your women inside men! The evil feminists are at it again! Good
thing for us that we have Rev. Falwell to warn us about such evils as
the Satanic Homo Teletubbies and the Satanic Lilithian Lesbien Feminist
Subverters and making the world safe for theocracy. Thank God for
Christendumb.

POOBAH
Gawd, I never thought I'd find myself defending Jerry Falwell...

The thing is, of course, he is right, at least partially; the Lilith Fair is
named after Lilith, the first wife of Adam according to Jewish lore. The
image that the promoters are trying to invoke is one of "uppity women" who
aren't subservient to men; I think the wild, demonic, sexual overtones are
just extra advertising gravy. In the worldview in which Mr. Falwell lives,
his point of view is perfectly reasonable.

Of course, I think this points out how silly this worldview is; Falwell's
first profession is that of a preacher, someone who has to spend his time
reading mind-numbing ancient scriptures to find modern-meanings in it that
aren't really there. Given that, it isn't surprising he finds "evil"
symbolism in secular functions he finds threatening to begin with. If  one
believes that everything in the world isn't as it appears, but is really a
battlefield between God & the Devil, when someone deliberately invokes the
"evil" side of your mythology, well, it's kind of hard for that person not
to see red.

This, it seems, is the natural conclusion of the fundamentalist worldview,
an almost clinically paranoid view of the world where nothing is as it
seems, where a rose is not a rose, but a symbol of the passion of Christ,
where every act has an "essential" meaning that must be decoded.  Speaking
for US society for a moment, what I find surprising is not that we pooh-pooh
Falwell for statements like these, but that given this we listen to him &
his ilk as much as we do on other "moral" subjects.

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