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The Falwell Affair

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  • #61
    Originally posted by Juvenal View Post
    Maybe HA can teach you to write better than you?
    Sure, whatever you say.
    The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

    Comment


    • #62
      Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
      However, that the topic resonated with so many does raise some interesting questions, does it not?
      Not in the sense you're suggesting. Pedophile scares are common. In an earlier time, similarly inchoate fears led to witch trials. Asking about the inner motivations of the accusers seems too much to me like asking about the motivations of a cannon round.

      I'm more inclined to ask about who fired the cannon.

      But not here.

      This thread is about the Falwell affair.

      Comment


      • #63
        Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
        Sure, whatever you say.
        As you wish. Please leave.

        Comment


        • #64
          Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
          Then why mention it?

          What "bad argument"? I made an observation in reply to KingsGambit on the likelihood of homophobic pastors [some of whom are later discovered to be homosexual/bisexual] projecting their own self loathing on to homosexuals who openly embrace and enjoy their sexuality.
          No, you didn't. Your "observation" was rather broader than that. As the Jerk would rather it not be further addressed here, I will let it drop.
          Enter the Church and wash away your sins. For here there is a hospital and not a court of law. Do not be ashamed to enter the Church; be ashamed when you sin, but not when you repent. – St. John Chrysostom

          Veritas vos Liberabit<>< Learn Greek <>< Look here for an Orthodox Church in America<><Ancient Faith Radio
          sigpic
          I recommend you do not try too hard and ...research as little as possible. Such weighty things give me a headache. - Shunyadragon, Baha'i apologist

          Comment


          • #65
            Originally posted by One Bad Pig View Post
            No, you didn't. Your "observation" was rather broader than that. As the Jerk would rather it not be further addressed here, I will let it drop.
            Forgive me. Discussions of logical inferences are argument structures are fine. But I don't want to turn this into a Qanon/pizzagate thread or a thread about the coming election.

            Comment


            • #66
              Originally posted by KingsGambit View Post
              It's been suggested that pastors who struggle with certain sins preach most often on those sins, as if to themselves. So it's plausible that some who may secretly struggle with homosexuality might focus on that issue to the exclusion of nearly all others.
              Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
              Freudian denial and/or self loathing? The latter being projected on to those who openly embrace and enjoy their sexuality as particularly vehement condemnation by the closet gay/bisexual.
              Originally posted by KingsGambit View Post
              In some cases this might be true. When I lived in Kansas, I knew a psychologist who was a very conservative Christian and an expert on sexuality. We were talking about our state's most favorite famous religious figure and he was fairly confident that Fred Phelps was likely projecting his own sexual feelings outward. I don't know if that's true or not but I was surprised at how confident he was.
              Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
              I suspect there is a strong likelihood.

              People who are brainwashed into denying their feelings and repeatedly told that their feelings [or their actions] are disgusting because those feelings and actions are "sinful" [especially if the individual is quite young at the time] can be psychologically scarred for life.
              Originally posted by One Bad Pig View Post
              Won't someone think of the pedophiles?
              I think that's a stretch, though there's likely an unwitting germ of truth in it. I think it would be better to treat pedophilia as a dangerous medical condition than to treat it as a moral failure. If homosexuality was similarly destructive, you'd have a better point.

              Comment


              • #67
                Originally posted by Juvenal View Post
                As you wish. Please leave.
                Yes sir. Have a wonderful day.
                The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                Comment


                • #68
                  Originally posted by Juvenal View Post
                  Not in the sense you're suggesting.
                  I should have put an emoticon beside that remark. I remember the Satanic Panics and various cases in the USA such as the McMartins and the Kellers.

                  From my own research over the years it would appear that present day conspiracy theories on satanic abuse and paedophila are merely the latest accretions that have built up over centuries which have their origins in the regular vilification of the Jews by Patristic and Medieval writers. Various ECFs including Irenaeus and Justin Martyr accused the Jews of habitual crimes including sexual vice and Chrysostom accused them of cannibalism. George Soros the latest exemplar of the "evil Jew" is to be found in these conspiracy theories, to wit his alleged involvement with the current protests in the US.

                  Substitute witches, communists, BLM, gays, Illuminati, Muslims, Democrats, or whatever group is to be denounced and vilified, and the ground is already prepared.
                  "It ain't necessarily so
                  The things that you're liable
                  To read in the Bible
                  It ain't necessarily so
                  ."

                  Sportin' Life
                  Porgy & Bess, DuBose Heyward, George & Ira Gershwin

                  Comment


                  • #69
                    Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
                    I should have put an emoticon beside that remark. I remember the Satanic Panics and various cases in the USA such as the McMartins and the Kellers.

                    From my own research over the years it would appear that present day conspiracy theories on satanic abuse and paedophila are merely the latest accretions that have built up over centuries which have their origins in the regular vilification of the Jews by Patristic and Medieval writers. Various ECFs including Irenaeus and Justin Martyr accused the Jews of habitual crimes including sexual vice and Chrysostom accused them of cannibalism. George Soros the latest exemplar of the "evil Jew" is to be found in these conspiracy theories, to wit his alleged involvement with the current protests in the US.
                    No accounting of Christian anti-semitism should exclude Luther's On the Jews and their lies, IMHO.

                    There was a fad some years ago that sprouted signs in the backs of car windows cautioning that there was a "Baby on Board." It was quite popular, and all the more so because so many of us have children, most of whom were once babies — I'm not entirely sure about the ones I see in supermarkets and variety stores because I've yet to discover the aisle where they're displayed for sale.

                    From their behavior once in the carts, though, I have to wonder why anyone would think they're worth the price.

                    But any voicing of a threat to children provokes a mindless response from the reptile brain where logic and reason hold no sway, evidenced by the piglet's mockery of any interest in the well-being of pedophiles without concern that it could be judged inhuman, or at the very least, unhelpful. Rationally, we should either kill them all or find a way for them to live without endangering the community.

                    Instead, they're treated to ancient moral condemnations with no better track record than those used to answer sexual improprieties in the priesthood.

                    Or Liberty University.

                    Substitute witches, communists, BLM, gays, Illuminati, Muslims, Democrats, or whatever group is to be denounced and vilified, and the ground is already prepared.
                    I for one welcome our new Reptilian overlords.

                    Comment


                    • #70
                      Originally posted by Juvenal View Post
                      No accounting of Christian anti-semitism should exclude Luther's On the Jews and their lies, IMHO.
                      Ah but he came much later and was building on a well laid foundation. Luther and the Jews is a complex issue. He did write That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew.

                      However, between that and his later texts, particularly the one you have cited, which are not only incredibly hostile but also exceptionally polemical, Luther’s views fundamentally altered. He appears to have initially advocated complete toleration for the Jews because he seems to have believed that , like the converted Jew he knew [Bernhard], other Jews would be moved to follow Bernhard’s example. When they didn’t, Luther’s view went to the other extreme.

                      Originally posted by Juvenal View Post
                      There was a fad some years ago that sprouted signs in the backs of car windows cautioning that there was a "Baby on Board." It was quite popular, and all the more so because so many of us have children, most of whom were once babies — I'm not entirely sure about the ones I see in supermarkets and variety stores because I've yet to discover the aisle where they're displayed for sale.

                      From their behavior once in the carts, though, I have to wonder why anyone would think they're worth the price.

                      But any voicing of a threat to children provokes a mindless response from the reptile brain where logic and reason hold no sway, evidenced by the piglet's mockery of any interest in the well-being of pedophiles without concern that it could be judged inhuman, or at the very least, unhelpful. Rationally, we should either kill them all or find a way for them to live without endangering the community.

                      Instead, they're treated to ancient moral condemnations with no better track record than those used to answer sexual improprieties in the priesthood.

                      Or Liberty University.
                      The attitudes are remarkably brutal and [dare I write it?] very unChristian. What would Jesus do, one wonders?

                      Originally posted by Juvenal View Post
                      I for one welcome our new Reptilian overlords.
                      "It ain't necessarily so
                      The things that you're liable
                      To read in the Bible
                      It ain't necessarily so
                      ."

                      Sportin' Life
                      Porgy & Bess, DuBose Heyward, George & Ira Gershwin

                      Comment


                      • #71
                        Not gonna link this directly because language.

                        Larry Flynt: My Final Farewell to the Falwells
                        Ironically, Falwell Sr. and I actually became friends later. We enjoyed many cordial visits, participated in debates across the country, and even exchanged Christmas cards. I have to concede that his friendship with me proves that, for the most part, he was practicing an essential tenet of his faith, forgiveness, and was a sincere Christian.

                        It's fair to say he was less sympathetic to Jr.

                        Comment


                        • #72
                          Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
                          My question would be why are Christian pastors/leaders so often found to be adulterers, swindlers, and on several occasions gay?
                          If I count correctly, I think 4 of 4 attempts to run right-wing Christian political parties in my country during my lifetime (depending on how you count them exactly) ended with sex scandals on the part of the leader. As far as I can recall, no leader of any secular political party here has ever had a sex scandal. So it doesn't seem to be an America-only issue.
                          "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                          "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                          "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

                          Comment


                          • #73
                            Meanwhile... An update.

                            Source: Jerry Falwell Jr. drops lawsuit against Liberty University


                            Jerry Falwell Jr. has dropped a defamation lawsuit he filed in October against Liberty University, just months after he resigned in August as president of the Christian school following a series of personal scandals, Falwell and a university spokesman confirmed on Wednesday.

                            In his lawsuit, Falwell alleged that Liberty damaged his reputation because it accepted without verifying what he called false statements made by a man who had an affair with Falwell’s wife and attempted to extort them.

                            “I’ve decided to take a time out from my litigation against Liberty University, but I will continue to keep all options on the table for an appropriate resolution to the matter,” Falwell said in a statement.

                            In a statement, the school said its leaders are pleased he has dropped the lawsuit and is working to find someone to succeed him.

                            “Falwell’s unilateral and voluntary dismissal was not prompted by any payments, promises, or other consideration from Liberty,” the school said.

                            Attorneys for Falwell on Wednesday notified the Lynchburg Circuit Court that he would not pursue his claim but did not state a reason for withdrawal.

                            Falwell’s endorsement of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 was seen as a crucial moment for the candidate who won over a high percentage of evangelicals in his election. Liberty has long been a center of power for conservative Christians, and Falwell’s resignation in August rocked the evangelical world after a series of personal scandals.

                            Before his resignation, Falwell was suspended after posting a photo on social media of his arm around his wife’s assistant showing their zippers partially down exposing their stomachs. The same day that Falwell resigned, a young businessman publicly claimed that he had had an extramarital affair involving both Falwell and his wife, Becki.

                            Giancarlo Granda, a former pool attendant, alleged that he would have sex with Becki Falwell while Jerry Falwell Jr. watched. Becki Falwell acknowledged the affair to The Washington Post, but both she and her husband denied that Falwell Jr. was involved.

                            The Falwells, the pool attendant and the double life that brought them all down

                            In the lawsuit, Falwell had stated that no one from Liberty’s board of trustees asked him about Granda’s allegations.

                            “By forcing Mr. Falwell’s resignation from Liberty immediately following Granda’s false and defamatory statements, Liberty sent the unmistakable message to the public that Granda’s false statements were, in fact, true,” the suit alleged.

                            The suit claimed that the school’s actions “drastically reduced” Falwell’s ability to be publicly involved in businesses and charity organizations, stating that Falwell has not been invited to appear on television and caused him “immense anguish.”

                            Falwell, a lawyer and businessman, was admired for building the university his father co-founded into one of the largest Christian universities in the world. Scott Lamb, a spokesman for the university, said Falwell has had nothing to do with the university since he left in August.

                            Falwell’s father, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., was a prominent leader of the religious right who founded the university and a church nearby led by another son, the Rev. Jonathan Falwell.

                            Jerry Falwell Jr. took over the university after his father’s death in 2007. When he resigned in August, Falwell told The Post that his contract entitled him to $10.5 million in severance.



                            Source

                            © Copyright Original Source




                            I'm always still in trouble again

                            "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
                            "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
                            "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

                            Comment


                            • #74
                              Another update, but from Vanity Fair[1]:


                              Source: INSIDE JERRY FALWELL JR.’S UNLIKELY RISE AND PRECIPITOUS FALL AT LIBERTY UNIVERSITY


                              Jerry Falwell Jr. was the Trump-anointing dark prince of the Christian right. Then a sex scandal rocked his marriage and ended his lucrative stewardship of the evangelical education empire founded by his father. In a series of exclusive interviews, Falwell -- accompanied by his wife, Becki -- describes the events that led to his ouster, their fallout, and why he’s finally ready to admit he never had much use for his father’s church anyway.

                              On the morning of August 18, 2021, Liberty University’s freshman class began arriving on campus in Lynchburg, Virginia, for the start of Welcome Week. The kickoff to the fall semester had the exuberance of a pregame pep rally. An outdoor sound system blasted Gary Glitter’s glam rock anthem “Rock and Roll Part II.” Student greeters in navy Liberty T-shirts whooped and cheered when a new arrival’s car pulled up to the dorms. Buildings all over the Jeffersonian-style campus were festooned with banners that read: “Liberty University: 50 Years of Training Champions for Christ.”

                              For 49 of those years, a member of the Falwell family had run Liberty, the country’s most influential evangelical university. But the day before orientation started, Jerry Falwell Jr., the son of the late televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. and the school’s president and chancellor from 2007 to 2020, was nowhere near campus. He was driving a white Jeep Wrangler along a dirt road on his 500-acre farm about 20 miles west of Lynchburg. “That’s the tallest mountain in Virginia,” he said, pointing at the Appalachian peaks rising in the distance. Ahead of us, black Angus cattle grazed in fenced pastures. At the edge of the property stood a 19th-century chapel no larger than a one-room schoolhouse. “Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant both worshipped in that church on different days,” Falwell said in his laconic drawl.

                              It was the first time I met Falwell in person. Behind the wheel, the 59-year-old looked like a prosperous country lawyer turned gentleman farmer. He was dressed in a lavender polo, dark jeans, and chestnut-brown leather sneakers. He had neatly parted silver hair and a trim silver beard on his round face. His wolflike ice-blue eyes were the only visible signs of the feral personality that had recently cost him his job and reputation.

                              On August 24, 2020, Falwell resigned from Liberty in the wake of a sensational tabloid scandal that could have been dreamed up in the writers’ room of The Righteous Gemstones. A former Miami pool boy named Giancarlo Granda claimed he had a nearly seven-year affair with Falwell’s wife, Becki—and that Falwell often liked to watch them have sex. Granda went on a national media tour—he gave interviews to ABC News, CNN, Reuters, Politico, and The Washington Post—and said the Falwells began “grooming” him when he was 20 and bought his silence with luxury vacations, rides on Liberty’s private jet, and an ownership stake managing a Miami Beach hostel. To bolster his claims, Granda released screenshots of Facetime calls and text conversations with Becki (“I’m not wearing any panties,” she allegedly wrote Granda in one message). Falwell released a statement that acknowledged Becki and Granda’s relationship, but he vehemently denied watching the trysts. Instead, Falwell said he was the real victim of a “Fatal Attraction–type” extortion plot after Granda demanded $2 million to keep the affair secret.

                              Viewed in hindsight, the scandal was the combustion of a self-immolating fire that Falwell had been stoking for months, if not years. Liberty had spent the better part of 2020 lurching from one PR crisis to the next brought on by Falwell’s boorish and reckless behavior, his race baiting, COVID-19 denials, and slavish devotion to Donald Trump. Two days after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Falwell tweeted a picture of a COVID mask that showed a man in blackface posing with a man in a KKK hood. In early August 2020, Falwell posted a photo on Instagram of himself aboard a yacht with his pants unzipped, a drink in one hand, and his other arm wrapped around a pregnant Liberty employee with her belly exposed. The controversies turned Falwell into an avatar of the rank hypocrisy, know-nothingism, and toxic masculinity that explained why 81 percent of white evangelical Christians voted in 2016 for Trump, a thrice-married reality TV star who literally boasted of grabbing women by the smiley bleep.gif .

                              The day Falwell resigned from Liberty, he gave an interview to his local NPR station and invoked the peroration of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. “Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, I’m free at last!” Falwell said. He offered no other explanation for his spectacular meltdown. People inside and outside Liberty were left asking what had caused Falwell, a married father of three, to completely self-destruct in public. He was a University of Virginia–trained lawyer and successful real estate developer. He rescued Liberty from near bankruptcy and transformed the nonprofit university into a financial powerhouse with more than 100,000 students and a $1.7 billion endowment. Over the course of a few months, he blew it all up. Why? I had gone to the farm to find out.

                              After giving me the tour, Falwell parked in front of a handsome farmhouse. Becki was waiting at the front door in jeans, sandals, and a black T-shirt that matched her long raven hair. She apologized about the exercise bike sitting incongruously in the foyer.

                              “I tried riding it but it killed my butt because the seat is slanted,” she said as we entered.

                              “I don’t know what we’re going to do with it,” Falwell complained.

                              Becki told him to drag it to the garage and disappeared down the hall. I found her on the patio checking on their golden retriever Sandy, who was patiently nursing a litter of four-week-old puppies. The father, a shaggy eight-year-old named Chance, dozed on the floor. “He’s an old lazy man,” Becki said.

                              A short while later, the Falwells sat in the kitchen and began to talk about the tumultuous events of the past two years. The wide-ranging conversation was one of many we had over the past eight months. What emerged was an intimate look inside a very public marriage as well as a Shakespearean drama about fathers and sons and the burden of legacy. For the first time, Falwell opened up about his true spiritual beliefs and how they diverge from those of his infamous father, who cofounded the Moral Majority and waged a scorched-earth cultural war for four decades. When I told Falwell that many people thought he, consciously or not, wanted to destroy himself, he considered it for a moment.

                              “Subconsciously, yeah, I believe that’s true,” he said, nodding. “It’s almost like I didn’t have a choice.” He went on: “Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not. My goal was to make them realize I was not my dad.”

                              hen you think of Jerry Falwell Sr., chances are you remember him as the Falstaffian televangelist who never refused an opportunity to say something outrageously offensive on camera. Falwell’s back catalog of homophobic, racist, and misogynistic comments is as thick as the King James Bible. In a 1958 sermon, Falwell inveighed against the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that, on paper, integrated public schools: “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line,” Falwell said. During a 1976 service, Falwell preached: “The idea [that] religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to prevent Christians from running their own country.” In the mid-1990s, Falwell promoted The Clinton Chronicles ($43), a right-wing propaganda video that accused the Clintons of a raft of crimes up to and including murder. And days after 9/11, Falwell went on television and blamed the terrorist attacks on gays, lesbians, feminists, abortion doctors, and the ACLU. “I point the finger in their faces and say, ‘You helped this happen,’ ” Falwell said.

                              While Jerry Falwell Sr. was a polarizing scold in public—an “agent of intolerance,” John McCain once said—Jerry Jr. remembered his father as lenient at home. “My dad wasn’t one of those overbearing parents who tried to control their kids,” he recalled. The elder Falwell didn’t force his namesake to attend church and didn’t care that his son collected Fleetwood Mac and Beatles records at a time when Baptists called rock and roll “devil’s music.” He also didn’t object when Jerry declared at an early age that he didn’t want to spread the good word. “People would say to me, ‘We know you’re gonna be a preacher because your dad is one. I thought, That’s the last thing I want to be,” Jerry said. He even tolerated Jerry’s moderate drinking, despite preaching that alcohol was “the worst, most offensive drug in American society.” “I asked him one time, ‘Why don’t you drink? Jesus drank wine,’ ” Jerry remembered. “And he said, ‘Well, I just like to be in control. I don’t like to be drunk.’ It wasn’t because of some religious reason.” His father’s contradictions would mold Jerry’s entire life.

                              Jerry Falwell Jr. was born in Lynchburg on Father’s Day, 1962. He was the oldest of three children. His sister, Jeannie, was born in 1964. His brother, Jonathan, arrived in 1966. As patriarch, Falwell Sr. was the sun around which the family orbited. Naturally, his sons competed for his affection. It wasn’t Cain and Abel exactly, but the brothers’ relationship was never close. “Jonathan was just constantly copying me. Whatever I did, in a matter of time he tried to duplicate it,” Jerry told me. (Jonathan Falwell declined to comment.) It also didn’t help that the brothers’ personalities were so different. Jerry was the withdrawn, rebellious one; Jonathan, the gregarious rule follower. “The brothers just looked at each other as weird,” a family friend said.

                              It’s ironic that Falwell Sr. was closest with his least outwardly religious son. “My dad and I were thick as thieves. He didn’t see eye to eye with Jonathan,” Jerry said. Temperamentally, the two Jerrys clicked. They loved playing Jackass-style pranks on people. “One time, Jerry Sr. put a live baby alligator in his wife Macel’s bathtub. She nearly fainted when she found it,” recalled Mel White, Falwell Sr.’s ghostwriter. Jerry Jr. once threw roadkill into a friend’s car as it went by, causing everyone inside to scream. His favorite song for a while was Loudon Wainwright’s “Dead Skunk.” At Liberty, Falwell Sr. terrorized students by speeding his SUV through crowded crosswalks. Jerry worried his dad would eventually run someone over, so he purchased a train horn with a compressor for his dad’s SUV. Falwell Sr. loved driving around campus, blaring the deafeningly loud whistle at unsuspecting students.


                              Source

                              © Copyright Original Source



                              [*Story continues at hyperlink provided above*]


                              I detest the sort of journalism they use, namely trying to make the reporter part of the story.

                              I'm always still in trouble again

                              "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
                              "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
                              "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

                              Comment


                              • #75
                                The whole thing is just really sad.
                                The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                                Comment

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