The Passion Of The Death Threats Against Jerry Falwell

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In the early 1980s homosexual savages* [scroll to the end], inspired by 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn bar, made death threats against this influential opponent of gay civil rights, over 100 pages of recently released FBI files suggest. From the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog:

[Jerry] Falwell's FBI file contains a 1983 letter sent to his television ministry that concluded with the words, "Hoping you will die soon." It was accompanied by a small plastic box containing a live scorpion. One threat involved calls to Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg in 1983, warning that a $10,000 reward had been offered for Falwell's "assassination" and that it was to be carried out by "gays in Cincinnati." One caller advised, "I know this is true, because my brother is one of them." Said another, "I intend to be the one to collect that money."

As disturbing as these threats (and one attempt, if you count the scorpion) is that WaPo phrases the item (and frames the issue) in banality bordering on the fickle and the reckless. Called simply, "Exclusive: Jerry Falwell's FBI File," the blogpost begins:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell , founder of the Moral Majority, stirred up passions with his attacks on abortion and homosexuality. Now, the FBI's confidential file on Falwell, who died in May at age 73, reveals that he also stirred up death threats....[emphases added]

Think about it. No matter how much authority the verb "to stir up" implies, only something pre-existing can be set in motion. Which is to say that neither Falwell nor the Devil made those ostensibly "passionate" homosexuals do it. (Granted, the Reverend might have disagreed with my take on the Devil's role in the matter.) People prone to passion will be found on each side of any debate, but making death threats catapults one beyond the pale of what is acceptable (indeed, of what is possible) as civil discourse. Because death threats destroy civil discourse. Like the bullying which taunts and torments another who is perceived to be "different," death threats against a public personality convey an aggressive contempt for the targeted individual. They also convey a cowardly disdain because they attempt -- always in futility, I should add -- to coerce through terror what one shrinks from achieving through debate.
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Unfortunately WaPo's "stirred up" phrasing suggests that deficient from Falwell's manner were reason, civility, and a certain love that dare not speak its name in the mainstream media, Christian love. Yet among the first news reports after his death was, from Falwell's most prominent public opponents, testimony to the contrary.

Pornographer Larry Flynt:

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person ... Jerry Falwell and I became good friends.  He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.

Openly-gay activist Rev. Mel White cried at news of the death of this adversary whom he also considered "a friend": 

"It breaks my heart," he said. "I feel sorry for his family. He had a huge presence in this town [White lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the vicinity of Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church] and the country."... He said while Falwell often condemned him from the pulpit, he would say hello every time he saw him around Lynchburg.... White said if anyone needs to learn anything from his and Falwell's relationship, it's that people should get their private and public lives in sync.

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Should WaPo's 400-word blogpost take pains to refer to Flynt's and White's statements? Probably not, Gentle Reader, but I feel I have to, even if it takes three times as long. Because the way WaPo reports those death threats accommodates their intellectual violence, which compromises the information conveyed. Why does the blogpost state in its short space twice that no assassination attempt had been made? If any had, then the attempt(s) would already be public knowledge, and even part of the public lore. Long ago they would have boosted Falwell's visibility; vividly they would have been evoked during our public remembrances. Obviously none had been attempted. So why does WaPo overstate the obvious? To understate what it intends to be less obvious: that gay radicals are a philosophically violent lot with latent and at times overt tendencies.

Sometimes this violence turns against their own. Many Americans, for example, know that two assassination attempts were made against President Gerald Ford. Not many know that one of them was thwarted by Oliver Sipple, a man who happened to be gay (and closeted). Gay radicals, including Harvey Milk, urged the compliant mainstream media to out him, which they did. That led directly to Sipple's estrangement from his family, and indirectly to his precipitous health decline and premature death. Even a framed letter from the White House didn't help him much (not in this life, anyway). The lesson to be learned here is not the insidiousness and ubiquity of "homophobia," but that any movement desperate for heroes is also a movement desperate for martyrs.

Sipple's heroic intervention on behalf of President Ford (indeed, on behalf of the country) had been back in 1975. Responding in 1983 to one of the assassination threats against Reverend Falwell, the FBI managed to locate an "informant" within Cincinnati's gay community. The facts he provided, quoted verbatim in the blogpost (grammatical errors included), read as sardonic mockery of the Bureau's interest and ability in obtaining any relevant information, whether about attested assassination threats or about the gay community generally. The quoted passage concludes, Source restated the general dislike for Falwell within the Cincinnati area, before the blogpost paraphrases another document, [T]he informant led the agents through the history of New York City's Stonewall riots -- a watershed in the early gay rights movement.... Even without access to any of the 100+ pages of Falwell's FBI file (a portion available here), an inquiring mind would figure that the ones WaPo references are not those most relevant to unearthing who, exactly, was behind these assassination threats. For example, spelled out in at least one other document (imaged above) is that one potential assassin had been a candidate for Congress in Santa Cruz, California in 1982. Surely that deserves further attention.

Instead of sifting through the most salient details of these assassination threats -- including, in fairness, asking whether any were made by heterosexuals (or even closeted gays) seeking to defame LGBTetc. people -- the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog cultivates in the reader's mind the image of a presumably "powerless" homosexual presumably "speaking truth to power." Whatever the ideological or agitational purposes that might serve, serving them up in a disorienting sentimentality ignores, if only temporarily, real evidence of crime and real clues as to the crime's origin and magnitude. The contemporary LGBTetc. movement would call this "queering" the profession of journalism. It's also what that movement would call "queering" the civic duty of cooperating with the FBI. The effect of all this "queering" is to make WaPo refrain, counter-intuitively and unprofessionally, from asking hard-hitting questions about a number of blood-thirsty, presumably merry gay homosexual pranksters -- and potentially murderous plotters.

WaPo, WaPo, why hast thou forsaken truth?
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[*]: Some readers have expressed apprehension at the phrase "homosexual savages."

It recalls a point Robert Bork makes early on in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline: Every new generation constitutes a wave of savages who must be civilized by their families, schools, and churches. (Chapter 1, "The Vertical Invasion of the Barbarians.") Whether "families, schools, and churches" civilize our young regarding LGBTetc. issues, or rather how they do so, is obviously a crucial dispute in "the culture war." Certainly anyone with an appetite for violence needs to be civilized.

I also have in mind two French films of the 1990s, Les Nuits fauves (Savage Nights) and, to a lesser extent, Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds). The latter, a slow-paced, art house triumph, is the delicate coming-of-age tale of four adolescents, one of whom is just recognizing his homosexuality. Savage Nights on the other hand is about a young bisexual man, HIV-positive, hellbent on avoiding maturity and mortality. Its succes de scandale was enhanced when writer-star-director Cyril Collard died of AIDS just three days before the film took home four Cesar awards (the French Oscars).

One of Savage Nights's more irksome moments is when it snatches a line from the notoriously homoerotic writer Jean Genet. Collard acknowledges who wrote the line while ignoring where it originally appeared. It's from "Violence and Brutality" (included here), an essay which has nothing directly to do with the story of Savage Nights, and which is, in fact, an apology for terrorism: Violence alone can put an end to the brutality of man....  

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Comments

[GM Roper]

Jeremiah, what a terrific post this is. You ask (and also give an answer) "Why does it state in its short space not once but twice that no assassination of Falwell had ever been attempted?" An answer, in addition to yours, might be that the media is trying to underscore that homosexuals, especially the activist type might say something, but as opposed to those cruel, heartless, churchgoing homophobes, they would NEVER DO ANYTHING violent, as opposed to say the killers of Matthew Sheppard which is always brought up when gays seem to confront anti-gay bigotry.

The truth of the matter is, that if the gay community EVER want's to live in their spot in "normal society" than they have to acknowledge that they also possess ALL of the emotional baggage of everyone else in the "normal society." (well, except for their sexual appetites perhaps).

Again, good post my friend, but that is what your many fans ALWAYS expect, and get here.

GM

[Jim Phelan]

"WaPo phrases the item (and frames the issue) in banality bordering on the fickle and the reckless..."

Yes, indeed.

[Steve Silberman]

Bravo, Jeremayakovka, for exposing the violence in the hearts of these so-called radicals and their fellow travelers in the media, and for revealing the late Reverend for the tender humanist that he was to his friends. After all, many of Falwell's apparently provocative public statements over the years -- that AIDS is "the wrath of a just God" and "God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals," that the ACLU is "to Christians what the American Nazi party is to Jews" and has "got to take a lot of the blame" for 9/11, that he did "not believe the homosexual community deserves minority status [because] one's misbehavior does not qualify him or her for minority status," that "if we don't act now" (with prayer and forgiveness, obviously!) the "homosexual steamroller will literally crush all decent men, women, and children who get in its way," that he hoped he "lived to say the day when we don't have any public schools," that Jews are "spiritually blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior" -- were merely a particularly bold form of tough love expressed in words that could have been uttered by Christ-the-peacemaker Himself, if "jazzed up" a little for TV, like a humble folksinger adding a pop sheen to his tunes to reach a mass audience. It's unfortunate that the *real* Falwell -- the gentle soul one who was pleasant in public even to self-proclaimed sinners like Mel White -- has been obscured by this chorus of lisping brutes and their suspiciously sympathetic champions at the Post.

[Aurora]

Excellent post, Jeremiah. Thanks for the close-up view of Rev. Falwell. He reminds me of our own Australian Falwell, Fred Nile, who was known for having the respect of the homosexuals at the Gay Pride Mardi Gras where Nile would take his group of Christians to protest.
Your expose of the homosexual lobby is a much needed honest look at this group. Society is so cowed about saying anything that you have a group which is cloaked in mystery.

I love this in the above comment chorus of lisping brutes LOL

[Douglas V. Gibbs]

Wow, what an unexpected pleasure. Jerry Falwell, people forget, did what he felt was his calling - he pointed out scripture and its application in today's society. But the homosexual activists, along with many other accomplices, have determined that even breathing a word that may counter their agenda, makes one a bigoted judgmental hate-crime committing barbarian - when in truth, from my point of view, it is the exact reverse.

[JMK]

Steve, the "violence in the hearts of these [so-called] radicals" is real and remains real.

Aurora, Douglas, I don't so much pretend to offer a close-up view of Rev. Falwell nor of "the homosexual lobby" as I make a claim for an investigation of certain of Falwell's enemies and, while doing so, to not rely on the MSM to conduct the investigation nor to arrive a worthy conclusion.