I vote ‘hate’.

CNN.com:

Falwell’s legacy: faith, hate or Teletubbies?

(CNN) – “When I have children one day,” Samantha Krieger of Dallas, Texas, wrote to CNN.com, “they will know of the legacy that Dr. Jerry Falwell left.”

But what will that legacy be?

To Krieger, who had personal connections to Falwell — she attended the college he founded; he officiated at her wedding; her husband was his nurse — the evangelist “was a great leader and hero.”

Victoria Kidd of Winchester, Virginia, believes the exact opposite: “The damage he has done to the Christian faith is immeasurable,” she wrote to CNN.com

Others would prefer to think that he has no legacy at all.

“He should be erased from every history book and media story,” wrote Brian Pippinger of St. Petersburg, Florida.

Jerry Falwell was the evangelical minister who founded the Moral Majority, the Christian right political movement, in 1980. He died Tuesday at age 73, and it’s clear from the differing assessments of his legacy that he was a controversial figure.

Matt Foreman, head of the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force, calls Falwell “a founder and leader of America’s anti-gay industry. His lasting legacy will be the polarization of the American electorate and the rise of Christian evangelicals as a political force in American politics.”

Gene Mims, a trustee of Liberty University, which Falwell founded as Lynchburg Baptist College in 1971, says he “pulled us all towards faith.” More narrowly, Mims says that Falwell’s founding of the university will be his specific, lasting legacy. “For the past 10 years, that was his focus.”
[...]

To many critics, this paradox is what makes his legacy so lamentable. “He made it comfortable for churches to get actively involved in politics,” says the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “His strategy will be continued by his would-be successors — a focus on hot-button issues like gay marriage (rather than significant moral issues like child poverty and health care), and an eagerness to make outrageous statements to the media, in order to build a religious-political empire.”

Many now remember him most for outrageous statements he made after leaving the Moral Majority — in 1999, his house organ the National Liberty Journal warned parents that the Tinky Winky TV character was secretly gay and morally dangerous; in 2001, he blamed the September 11 terrorist attack on “pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America.”

Susan Friend Harding sees these as his King Lear moments. “He had already lost power by then. It’s sad to think he’ll be remembered for his remark about Teletubbies.”

(In a totally unrelated story, sunshine and rainbows broke out across the U.S. yesterday, sparking smiles and joy.)

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