Al Gore won an Oscar last night for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” An Oscar that everyone saw coming from 2 million light years away. Which is why I’m not surprised that conservatives were ready to counterattack this morning with a number of articles pooh-poohing the reality of global warming. None, however, may be more audacious than the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who issued his own Christianist Fatwa against the environmental movement yesterday:
LYNCHBURG, Va. The Reverend Jerry Falwell says global warming is “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” from evangelism to environmentalism.
Falwell told his Baptist congregation in Lynchburg yesterday that “the jury is still out” on whether humans are causing — or could stop — global warming.
But he said some “naive Christian leaders” are being “duped” by arguments like those presented in former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth. Falwell says the documentary should have been titled “A Convenient Untruth.”
Falwell said the Bible teaches that God will maintain the Earth until Jesus returns, so Christians should be responsible environmentalists, but not what he calls … quote … “first-class nuts.”
Read those quotes from Falwell carefully. In effect, Falwell is saying that Al Gore is a “first class nut,” is in “league with Satan” to deflect the church from focusing on the rapture its evangelical mission, and is duping any Christian naive enough to believe the “snake oil” Al Gore (and, the overwhelming consensus of Satan worshippers climate scientists) is peddling on the global climate crisis.
This is first class propaganda folks. Al Gore last night at the Academy Awards said that global warming is not a Republican issue, or a Democratic issue, it’s a moral issue. Reverend Falwell is doing his damnedest to convince conservative Christians that Gore is wrong, and that even believing in the reality anyone with open eyes can see is blasphemy. It’s slick, it’s sick and it is an utterly unprincipled lie. In short, it’s classic right wing bullshit, from a one of the biggest holier than thou blowhards on the American scene today.
Falwell’s words, and the actions (or lack thereof) he demands from his flock are also profoundly immoral. But that’s par for the course from Falwell, a man who blamed America first for the 9/11 terror attacks, rather than the religious extremists who carried them out. A man who demonizes homosexuals and muslims every chance he gets. A man who is a well known racist and anti-semite.
We should have expected that he would issue such bigoted and irrational statements in an attempt to smear Al Gore and confuse his followers regarding the greatest moral crisis of this Century, global climate change. A crisis which threatens millions of species with extinction, and which also threatens to kill or displace hundreds of millions of people worldwide, especially those who live in the poorest countries on earth. However, the slaughter of innocents has never been much of a concern for Reverend Falwell, nor has the expression of Christian mercy or compassion ever been his primary mission in life. He regularly preaches a Gospel that ignores the teachings of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as if they were The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, rather than some of the most beautiful and important spiritual messages ever communicated. No Falwell prefers his own gospel of hate, not the one Jesus proclaimed which made love it’s greatest commandment.
Ecce homo. Behold the man. This is what he does. This is who he is.
