Friday, May 25, 2007
Chickens Come Home to Roost
"I have never seen blatant hatred for anyone like I have seen for the late Jerry Falwell," writes Rob Hood in the Conservative Voice. "All over the internet (sic), particularly militant left wing sites, there was a seething hatred for Dr. Jerry Falwell and his ministry and call for America's repentance."
And Mr. Hood thinks he knows why Falwell was hated.
"Evolution is the prime suspect in the investigation of a nation gone astray. Moral relativism can be blamed for the idea of evolution. Racism and especially Nazism can be blamed for evolution."
The iron logic of Mr. Hood's reasoning has but one flaw. Falwell was a devout creationist, a strict biblical literalist, and a staunch segregationist. When civil rights activists marched for voting rights in Mr. Falwell's South, he opposed them. When blacks in South Africa demanded the end of apartheid, Falwell stood on the other side.
If belief in evolution is the cause of racism, as Mr. Hood asserts, how then to explain that the creationist movement has its roots in the bible believing Jim Crow South?
How does Mr. Hood explain the fact that slavery, and the ideology of racism that justified it, predates Darwin's birth and the publication of Origin of Species by centuries?
Well, like all else, he doesn't.
Perhaps the anger at Falwell, and the religious right, is a natural consequence of his own hatred of blacks, women, gays, the foreign born, members of other religious faiths, seculars, and the Constitution and laws of the United States.
And just maybe the anger isn't hatred. It's just telling it like it is about a man who used hatred and fear as a weapon all his life.
And Mr. Hood thinks he knows why Falwell was hated.
"Evolution is the prime suspect in the investigation of a nation gone astray. Moral relativism can be blamed for the idea of evolution. Racism and especially Nazism can be blamed for evolution."
The iron logic of Mr. Hood's reasoning has but one flaw. Falwell was a devout creationist, a strict biblical literalist, and a staunch segregationist. When civil rights activists marched for voting rights in Mr. Falwell's South, he opposed them. When blacks in South Africa demanded the end of apartheid, Falwell stood on the other side.
If belief in evolution is the cause of racism, as Mr. Hood asserts, how then to explain that the creationist movement has its roots in the bible believing Jim Crow South?
How does Mr. Hood explain the fact that slavery, and the ideology of racism that justified it, predates Darwin's birth and the publication of Origin of Species by centuries?
Well, like all else, he doesn't.
Perhaps the anger at Falwell, and the religious right, is a natural consequence of his own hatred of blacks, women, gays, the foreign born, members of other religious faiths, seculars, and the Constitution and laws of the United States.
And just maybe the anger isn't hatred. It's just telling it like it is about a man who used hatred and fear as a weapon all his life.
