- May 24th, 2007, 9:31 pm
#86430
DINESH D'SOUZA
The Revelers at Falwell's Funeral
Posted May 24th 2007 2:26PM by Dinesh D'Souza
The venom expressed by some on the left and in the atheist community upon the death of Falwell is very revealing. I don't think you'd see anything comparable if, say, Michael Moore died. Falwell was, by all acounts, a good Christian. He didn't approve of things that Christianity teaches are bad, but he was unfailingly decent in the way that he treated individuals, even those he strongly disagreed with. Moreover, he didn't just condemn things like abortion. He sponsored programs to help unwed moms carry their fetuses to term. Unlike some of the other televangelists, he wasn't a hypocrite who preached one thing and did another. His lengthy public life was free of financial and sexual scandal.
And yet here is blogger Amanda Marcotte--a former employee of John Edwards--declaring that upon Falwell's death "the gates of hell swing wide open and Satan welcomes his beloved son." Religion columnist Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun Times reacted this way. "Good. Ding-dong, the witch is dead." Then there were all the folks on Wonkette and other blogs who wished he suffered, wished he turned into a vegetable, and so on.
Why such venom? As I was pondering this question in my study I came across Christopher Hitchens' book savaging Mother Teresa. It's called The Missionary Position. Now of all the people in the world to write an expose about, why choose the saint of Calcutta? What was her offense, except to help poor and starving people to find, in their last hours, a measure of love and dignity?
To explain all this I think we have to turn to Shakespeare's Othello, where Iago says of Cassio, "He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly." And here we have it. Saintly people like Mother Teresa and committed Christians like Falwell inspire hatred because they point to a standard that holds us accountable. Even more, they live that standard showing that it is not some abstraction. But there is a powerful human tendency to want to pull these people down, so that the good guys can be revealed as not so good after all, and this becomes an excuse for us to continue to live in a petty and sordid way.
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