Part Two: Jerry Falwell: Founder of the Religious Right

Robert is joined again by Sofiya Alexandra to continue discussing Jerry Falwell.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
What stolen back my sling from Sophie. I'm Robert Evans
hosted Behind the Bastards, and I have stolen back the
bagel flinging sling that Sophie stole from me uh and
will very soon use it in a way that is
damaging to both property and people. Um. Also, this is
a podcast where occasionally we talk about bad people, but

(00:21):
more often than not these days, I just do increasingly
reckless things because no one has stopped me. I have
been canceled yet. Oh you you You are in Cansylvania,
as we determined last episode, and tell us who your
roommates are currently. Well, I'm living with Louis c K,
which is, let me tell you, pretty uncomfortable. Yeah, Myles

(00:42):
didn't love him as a roommate. He wasn't Canceledvania. No,
not great, not great. Also bad cleaning, I'll give it,
you know what, I'll get to the cooks a pretty
decent omelet, not a bad omelet cookery. You know everyone's
got positive negative never cleans the toilet. I would expect that,

(01:04):
and Louis c K can damage a toilet. Let me
tell you, I believe it. You know who else you
could damage a toilet. Jerry Fowell and Ronald Reagan. Those
jellybeans did not come out smooth. I don't know why
we're talking about poop, because you're an odd duck, and
I followed you to the poop, to the poop. That's

(01:29):
the true meaning of friendship. That's how you know it's real.
That's how you know it's real. Speaking of real, this
is a bad leading. Ronald Reagan today is such an
icon among the religious right that it's easy to forget.
He wasn't always viewed this way. You have to remember
that back before his eight years in office, before his
monstrous and unforgivable failure to respond to the AIDS epidemic,

(01:50):
Reagan had a reputation for being a somewhat liberutine playboy
movie star. He had tons of gay friends. He was
plugged into the Hollywood set. Reagan had long been concerned pative,
but he was not seen as a member of the
religious right. Of course, some of that had to do
with the fact that the religious right did not really
exist when Reagan was in politics. Jimmy Carter, on the
other hand, was and is a deeply devout evangelical Christian

(02:14):
even today at age roughly one hundred and seventy. He
spends most of his free time building houses for the poor.
The fact that the Moral Majority and the bulk of
American Evangelical Christians broke for Reagan in the nineteen eighty
election was a strange novel development on this subject. Doug
Banwort writes, although Reagan was not the perfect conservative, he
was better than Carter, who had not accomplished significant legislation

(02:37):
or executive orders to appease the evangelical community. Bruce Bursumo
wrote that the Moral Majority was pinning its hopes on
Ronald Reagan and the presidential election. The Moral Majority, Christian Voice,
and other Christian political organizations hoped that they could have
a real evangelical social conservative on which they could depend
in the White House. Carter was not sufficient. So Carter's
crying right now. Yeah, he's like, I was not so

(03:00):
for Shure. Yeah, I mean, Jimmy Carter made the mistake
of actually like like like like like reading about the
stuff Jesus said, uh, and and we're interpreting it in
a positive wye and using it as like, oh, I
should probably take care of poor people in the disenfranchise
exactly whereas Jerry Follwell read it and said, well, clearly

(03:20):
black people are supposed to go to school with white kids.
Hen Reagan was like, oh, I think mentally ill people
have been having it too easy. Yeah. Yes, Ronald Reagan
the only Republican to push for massive gun control. Uh,

(03:40):
didn't get a distill does not get attacked for it
because the purpose of it was disarmed black people. That's
the story we'll tell at some point. Yeah, that's why
California has a bands on open carrying. Actually, cool stuff,
cool story. Ronald Reagan now one of the everybody's hero

(04:02):
of course. Of course, one of the chief reasons Jerry
Fallwall and the devout throngs he spoke for disliked Carter
was his support for feminism. Back in the nineteen sixties
and early seventies, when the feminist movement had first launched,
it had seen tepid support from conservative Christian circles. This
started to change in the mid nineteen seventies, largely as
a result of the feminist movement's decision to treat gay

(04:22):
people like human beings and not diseased. Pariah's Yeah, real
tactical misstep there. In November nineteen seventy seven, the National
Women's Conference was held in Houston, Texas. Feminist activists declared
an alliance with several gay rights groups and a meeting
earlier in the year, feminist activists had noted that lesbians
made up a significant portion of the movement. The lesbians

(04:44):
sucking run ship. You want somebody to make a fucking
Excel spreadsheet and show up on time, you get a lesbian. Yep,
I'm just giving advice out here. Over people were trying
to hire, seconding that advice. Yeah. Also, it's pretty easy
to pirate Microsoft Excel. I don't have anything else to add.

(05:07):
It's just in Google Docs. They can use their sheets too. Yeah,
but that's not stealing something. No, it's not. You really
want to be transgressive you have a lesbian woman's steel
Microsoft Excel and then really fighting the power show it
to Mr Paperclip. Okay, so yeah. The SOA, the National

(05:29):
Women's Conference acknowledged that the oppression faced by gay people
was very much rooted and many of the same things
that caused the oppression of women in American society. Intersectionalism,
you could call it. Morally, this was the right decision,
but it led to a tremendous backlash against feminism by
America's most intolerant Christians. Two years before the establishment of
the Moral Majority, Jerry Fallwell said this about the gay
rights movement. Though they claim to be another poorly treated minority,

(05:53):
homosexuals are involved in open immorality as they practice perversion.
They're not a minority any more than murderers, rapists, or
they're centers are a minority since they cannot reproduce. They prostallite, prostallite, prostite.
He's saying that they have to recruit people. And this
is like so Jerry, like there's a conspiracy now, Like

(06:13):
if you watch like Alex Jones show and they're reporting
like the Drag Queen Story Hour, there's this like belief
among them that it's like this this attempt by the
LGBT community to recruit young Jerry Fallwell innvinced that conspiracy theory.
He's like the first really prominent voice saying that, like, well,
because obviously being gay is in something natural. It's not
something that like just a certain portion of the population
is always going to be because that's just the way

(06:35):
that human beings are, as well as every other species
that reproduces sexually are um, Like he decides the only
way that they can make new gay people is to
convert children. Um and like that's obviously now, Like you
could run into it at shipload today. It's like a
huge conspiracy theory and we have Jerry Falbalt to thank
for that. So that that's cool. I mean, I don't

(06:59):
know where that comes from. It's like, do you think
straights are out there teaching straight people how to straight? Yeah?
It does kind of insinuate that, like being straight isn't
natural either, and you just have to like capture kids
with whatever. Right, the kids just come out completely without
any identities, and then like whoever catches them first, Yeah,
that's the sexuality they're going to get. Yeah, they're like

(07:19):
they're like birds imprinting on the first thing they see
out of the egg. So lucky. The first thing I
saw when I came out was a penis and a vagina.
That's how I became by right away. It was a
weird hospital you were born in. I mean it was
an all nude hospital, my request hospital. I requested that
in the womb. I would love it if we just

(07:41):
did a shot for shot remake of e Er, but
everyone's naked and they never ever ever address it, not
for one second. I would love it, not just because
I want to see like clone. Well, so I was
Annoya Wiley fan. Oh yeah he was hot, but I
mean I kind of really wanted them to kiss all ways,
but they never would. Sorry, that was a personal journey.

(08:03):
It's I. I have some good news for you. There's
about four hundred thousand pages of fan fiction where they do,
in fact consummate that relationship. So I know what I'm
doing after this podcast. I am excited for what deep
fakes are going to do for fan fiction. Uh, romances
like that's it's really going to be groundbreaking. I'm horny already. Yeah,

(08:26):
so is Reddit. Oh yeah, I should probably read the
podcast that we're doing. I was thinking about George Clooney
and Noah Wiley me too, Yeah, we all were so.
Jimmy Carter was far from an outspoken gay rights advocate
during his time in office, although he has since been
very outspoken about that, but he did lend his vocal
support to the feminist movement, including the nineteen seventy seven
National Women's Conference, to Fallwell and his fellow evangelicals. This

(08:49):
made Jimmy Carter a traitor to God's cause. They further
hated Carter for his liberal policies and the value of
social programs. Compounding this was the fact that the mid
to late nineteen seventies was a time of deep economic
stagnation and a high unemployment. And this recession had actually
started at the tail end of Nixon's time and power,
and it reached its deepest severity during Gerald Ford's presidency
UH and continued through Carter's term in office. The actual

(09:12):
causes of this stagflation, which is a term we all
learned in high school, are complex and multifaceted, rooted in
a combination of enormous government spending on the Vietnam War,
surging oil prices, and a series of union strikes. Things
actually improved economically during Carter's term, but not quickly enough
for Fallwell and his fellows on the religious right. Rather
than see the recession is what it was, a complex

(09:33):
disaster brought on by many different decisions, particularly those made
by Richard Nixon, they decided the politic move would be
to blame the economy on social programs. This tight end
with a growing belief among the religious right that the
federal government was incapable of handling social programs. They wanted churches,
guided by powerful pastors like Jerry Fallwell to see to
the poor and disenfranchised. Fall will express this wish, let

(09:55):
us train see to the poor. Is such a hilariously
privileged like TURNI phrase. It's like someone say to the poor, yeah, please,
And this is this idea that like if the government's
taking care of them, then they're basically slaves to the government,
as opposed to it's like why would we care about them?
That's gross government? Come on, please get in here, yes,

(10:17):
please take care of the pause, shall you? Yeah? Yeah?
And it's like like it is it is kind of
rooted this idea that he had that like he should
he and other pastors should own the poor, should like
control them, like because they clearly believe that the government.
Like that's one of the lines you're here on the right,
is that like, well, if you have all these social programs,

(10:38):
then basically, like all these people are indebted to the
government and they're they're just going to vote for more
social programs. But it's like if you're saying that you
want churches to take care of it, and you're just
saying you want those churches to people to be indebted
to the church, of course. Yeah, it's cool, cool way
for things to have work. Yeah. Jerry Fallwell was a
committed anti communist, and he also saw the social safety

(10:59):
net the Democrat at it increasingly invested in since the
New Deal that's fundamentally dangerous. In nineteen six he preached
that if God lifts his hand from America, it's all over.
And if America loses her freedom, the free world is gone.
America should bless the world with expensive healthcare and not
being able to feed your family. Also, it's always like
motherfucker's being like, oh, I know what everybody should be

(11:21):
doing that. You're like, no one literally asked you ever,
But no, this is with the moral This is the
moral genda I have for the poors who I now own,
which is so just so weird. And also there's a
fundamental belief that poor people are somehow different from rich people.
You know, that they're like of a lower stock and

(11:42):
a different cast they'd be rich. Yeah, that's the whole thing.
It's like it comes it's such a deep seated thing
that like it's beautiful poor masses. It's always like Oh yeah,
they're fucking dumb. They're dumb as hell. Otherwise they'd be us. Yeah,
otherwise they would have started did a mega church and
made money off of themselves. Yeah. It's uh, it's like

(12:07):
it's neo feudalism, you know, totally. That's what Jerry Fallwell
wants to be, is like a little king with a
castle and some peasants who have to do what he says. Now,
and for Jerry Fallwell, America losing its freedom was synonymous
with America's spending money on stuff like food stamps. In
the late nineteen seventies, he made increasing claims that quote,
federal welfare checks went to bums who wouldn't work in

(12:28):
a pie shop eating the holes out of donuts. Jerry foul.
I love that he thinks that's a job. And also
I want that job. I do want that job. I
do want that job. To Jerry Fallwell. The roots of
the economic crisis weren't a global dependence on oil, opex,
domination of the oil market, or the outrageous spending by
several presidential administrations on a failed war. The cause was

(12:49):
welfare spending from Fallwell, because of the heavy taxation demanded
for the support of a sick and unbalanced welfare program.
The very heart is being cut out of the business community.
The government seems to be committed to ta seeing the
successful businessman right out of business. Yeah, it's a real
problem in the seventies businessmen being taxed out of business.
And so for all these reasons, in nineteen eighty, the

(13:11):
moral Majority turned its back on the most committed evangelical
Christian to ever hold executive office and extend turned towards
movie star Ronald Reagan. Wild Yeah, and Reagan didn't really
know how to deal with the moral Majority, like he
was didn't really talk about his Christian worldview in his
first campaign. He didn't really talk about like how it
had impacted his beliefs or anything like that. Like he

(13:32):
wasn't that guy. Like nowadays, you can't imagine a Republican
winning by not like even if it's Trump, like misquoting
Bible versus they've got to like do that ship. Reagan
really didn't in his first campaign, And it was actually
revealed during the election that he donated less than one
percent of his income to religious causes, which is way
short of like the ten percent tithing that you're supposed

(13:52):
to do. But for the first and only time, Christian
conservatives decided it was okay to vote for a man
who wasn't religious in a against a man who profoundly was, uh,
in order to get tax benefits because money is the
real God. Yeah, that that really is like the that's
my conspiracy theory about Jerry Fallwell. So, once Reagan got elected,

(14:17):
evangelicals of the moral majority came to believe that they
had a president who would advance their agenda of like
getting rid of abortion and bringing back school prayer and
getting governments to let them not have black kids at
their schools. Um. And a lot of people who were
like rational observers of all of this thought that they
were kind of fooling themselves, um, because there was really

(14:39):
no chance that Reagan was going to do any of that.
Ship Like, he was a conservative, but Ronald Reagan wasn't
gonna wait into like pulling away Rov Wade or reinstituting
like school prayer or anything like that. And so like
while they were in office, Reagan's administration would kind of
like talk nicely to the moral majority, but he actually
didn't do most of the stuff that they wanted. Um.

(15:00):
The Reagan administration proved to be a huge disappointment for
Jerry Fallwell. Throughout his first year in office, Ronnie refused
to go after any of the social issues the new
Christian Right had voted him into office to deal with.
Abortion remained legal, mandatory, school prayer remained illegal. Feminism continued
at slow march forward. The only social arena in which
Reagan's corporatist chunk of the Republican Party remained in line
with the religious right was the oppression of gay people.

(15:23):
So at least there's that for Jerry Nice to find
some common ground. Common ground. The common ground is stomping
on the head of Yeah Yeah. Conservatives in San Francisco
attempted to criminalize homosexuality during Reagan's term, and the Moral
Majority launched a boycott of sponsors for TV shows that
included anything they considered an abomination in the eyes of God.

(15:46):
As the AIDS crisis kicked off and the death tolls
started arise from the hundreds to the thousands to the
tens of thousands, Jerry Folwell was there to blame the
catastrophe on gay people. I'm going to quote next from
a National Institute of Health publication. The social impact of
AIDS on the United States. The Reverend Jerry Fallwell, an
independent Baptist minister, in a sermon titled how Many Roads
to Heaven, delivered on his nationally televised Old Time Gospel Hour,

(16:08):
stated that God was bringing an end to the sexual
revolution through the AIDS epidemic. He also said, they gay
men are scared to walk near one of their own
kind right now, and what we preachers have been enabled
to do with our preaching. A God who hates sin
has stopped dead in its tracks by saying do it
and die? Do it and die follows political organization or
all majority opposed governmentally funded research to find a cure

(16:29):
for AIDS because the disease was a gay problem. He
promoted the idea that AIDS was not only God's judgment
on gay men, but also that divine judgment extended to
all of society. AIDS is a lethal judgment of God
on America for endorsing this vulgar, perverted, and reprobate lifestyle.
Strong condemnations of gay sexuality is the cause of AIDS
and God's vengeance also appeared in some religious journals. One
of them affirmed God warned mankind about AIDS in numbers

(16:52):
thirty two twenty three when he said be sure your
sin will find you out. Maybe the AIDS plague will
educate the world that the Bible is still the bedrock
of civilization and it should be learned, loved, and lived
in our daily lives. Wow. I really feel like getting
people to get into Christianity by saying that God could

(17:13):
occasionally punish you with AIDS is really not the strongest
pitch I've heard for Christianity. I really feel like that's
not If you throw that bagel, you're out of the show.
I'm just prepure fired. Sophie's face is very just prepping it.
I have to deal with my rage at reading that
paragraph somehow, and the way I'm doing it is by
putting my sling back together and getting it loaded. All right,

(17:35):
you load it up, but you don't throw a yet.
Not yet. If you hit the dog, she's not in here. Okay, Yes,
so this is the best time to throw a bagel. Really, See,
I planned this out. I didn't. The exact impact of
fallwell in the moral majority on the death toll of

(17:56):
the AIDS crisis is impossible to calculate. As with the
nineteen seventies recession. This was a disaster with many factors
behind it. We dealt with some of that in our
two part are on the Reagans and the AIDS epidemic.
The total death told AIDS would measure close to half
a million by the year two thousand. Much of the
government and action on AIDS during the crucial early years
of the outbreak can be blamed on the religious rights
of vicious rejection of any money being spent to help

(18:18):
people sick with what was then called the gay plague.
It's nuts to me to be like, oh, um, we're
going to meddle in your business and tell you that
you can be a but also, um, now that you
need help for what we've called a gay disease, we're
gonna just completely step away. How do you How do
you have in both ways where you're like meddling and

(18:39):
telling people what to do, but then you're also like no,
but then not this part. It's the same way it
always works with these people where the only actual moral
consistency is hate. Yeah, it's true. There's no actual philosophy
that can stand up to anything. Yeah, if you think
about the core of it being hate, then it all
is consistent. Yeah, because there they're justification will change and
like they'll say like yeah, we shouldn't spend any money. Uh,

(19:03):
like we we can't you know, spend any money to
like help out gay people. But also like, uh, we
can't consider homosexuality in any way as like a government
and like all these different like contradictory things, but the
core of it is just they want gay people to die.
So if you think about it like that, then yeah,
they're like completely consistent, very consistent kind of what everyone

(19:24):
who's not white and wealthy to die. Um, but they
hide the wealthy part from the people that they need
to vote. I mean, that's drump right now. So saying
this is kind of where the core of that is
a political movement came from, because like before this, like
there were conservatives, but they were like like like Nixon,
the shitty stuff he did was kind of like there

(19:45):
was a lot of shitty stuff he did. But you
could also have a guy like Nixon who would do
like rational things like well, but of course we need
to protect the environment and like okay, I'll open trade
with China even though like there are are big nemesis
Like that seems quaint now, also bomb camboat you into
the Stone Age, but like he's not gonna like he's

(20:05):
he's It was just different, different kind of shitty. Yeah,
we've really evolved. We really have evolved thanks to Jerry Fallwell. Now,
there was an appeal during this time when the Christian
Broadcasting Network where they asked their followers to write the
Justice Department in opposition to any relaxation of the rule
against immigration of HIV infected persons, and that don't generated

(20:29):
forty letters. And I can't think of anything more christ
like than not wanting sick immigrants to be helped. Yeah,
as as Jesus said, fuck you got mine. Famous. So
abortion remained a key issue for the moral majority throughout
the nineteen eighties. They did not see much support from

(20:49):
the regular administration on this. Folwell's tactic was to seek
a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade, since the
Supreme Court had already declared that this undue restriction of
abortion was a violation of constitutionals. His first step towards
achieving this was the Human Life Bill, which would have
written into American law that life begins at conception and
that a fetus is a living person. But the Human
Life Bill never passed. Follows embraced this tactic set the

(21:12):
tone of the abortion debate, though in a way that
rings through to this day. The Reagan administration was never
quite willing to take real action, though, because that would
have cost them the political capital that they preferred to
spend on de regulation and de institutionalization. But later on
Reagan at all would throw a few bones to the
moral majority. In nineteen eighty two, one of his allies
in the Senate introduced a constitutional amendment that would have
made it legal to have official school prayers as long

(21:34):
as individual students or teachers couldn't be forced to say
that prayer. The amendment never came particularly close to passing,
and Reagan himself failed to go to bat for it
in any significant way. Though early in nineteen eighty two,
Reagan's Justice and Treasury departments did reverse the I R.
S revocation of tax exempt status for Bob Jones University,
but this sparked a massive backlash at the administration for
basically supporting segregation with taxpayer dollars. Yeah, yeah, Baba Jones

(21:58):
keeps insisting, like, no, we're really committed to segregation. Yeah,
it's our religious beliefs. It's not based on racism. It's
based on what we think God wants, which we know
about beer than anyone, which is racism, but not our
racism God God. So it's fine, It's totally not us.

(22:20):
So uh. Reagan back pedaled and announced that he was
now seeking a congressional ban on tax exemptions for racially
discriminatory schools. This happened, and so while the Moral Majority
wound up supporting Reagan's reelection campaign, the Christian right came
out the other side of the Reagan years deeply disappointed
in conservative politics. We only got some of what we wanted.
We didn't get everything. Jerry Fallwell, however, was not the

(22:43):
kind of guy to put all of his eggs in
one basket. Throughout the early years of the Moral Majority,
and over the course of Reagan's two terms, Jerry fought
an epic battle for the soul of the First Amendment
with a man who might rightly be viewed as his
greatest nemesis, Larry Flint. Larry Flint Baby, finally a hero.
Finally a hero arrives. And we're going to talk about
that hero. But you know what else is a hero?

(23:05):
Sophia the corporations who sponsored this podcast. It's Coke Industries.
Coke Industries, you mean Coke Hero when dis tries Hero
Industries by Coke products. No, no, no, Sophie is so

(23:29):
mad at you. Sophie's very mad at me. Sorry, I
I'm distracted thinking about when I'm going to utilize the
sling next. The mold on that vegel is truly discussed.
Isn't so much mold on this vegel? He keeps putting
it next to the food I actually put in my mouth,
and I'm like, why are you doing that? I can't
explain my actions, I just do them. Speaking of which products,

(23:54):
I'm Robert Evans posted behind the Bastards and after a
long day of reading about terrible people, nothing helps me
calm down like cooking and eating a great meal. But
it takes a long time to go to the grocery
store and to figure out like different recipes to cook,
which is why Hello Fresh has been so simple for me.
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(24:14):
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bt B nine for nine free meals again, Hello Fresh
dot com slash bTB nine. We're back, and Sophie is

(24:58):
saying mean things to me, I think in an attempt
to get me to throw this bagel. No one's attempting
to get you to throw that. Everybody's excited for me
to throw this bagel. That's really the highlight of the show.
That's what keeps the listeners coming back. That bagel touches
me from him. I can't promise it won't. I can't
promise what I'll do. That's fine, great, This is a

(25:23):
tense standoff. I can't wait to see how it resolves
every podcast. Nothing goes better with an audio medium than
a standoff based mainly on eye contact, also saying I
would pick her in a fight. Yeah. Also, we're wearing
pretty much the exact same outfit. Kind of we are
wearing the exact same outfit. Is gonna be like me
fighting my own shadow So if you can that be

(25:45):
the ad plug for the or the video plug for
the episode, you guys fighting, I mean sure, shadow box. So, uh,
we're talking about Larry Flint. We finally have a hero.
Are you excited for this? So excited? Like you big
Fani Larry Flint? I mean, who doesn't love Larry Flint.

(26:06):
Larry Flint. That movie was so fun. Yeah, one of
the best smut peddlers there who was ever peddled smut?
And I say that top three with love in case
you weren't aware. Larry Flint is one of the most
infamous UH smut peddlers of all time. He's the founder
of Hustler magazine, a trailblazer in the field of pornography,
and as a child, he claims to have lost his

(26:26):
virginity to a literal chicken. Did you know that chicken? Yeah,
he grew up on a farm and he said, like
farm kids would suck animals and that's how we lost it,
he claimed for years, that's how he lost its virginity
to a chicken. Interesting. I mean I figured farm animals, sure,
but chicken seems very he really specific and consistent chick.

(26:51):
I mean they have to be able to push an
egg out, so I imagine there would be more room
in there for your teenage farm boy Dick. I hate
this continue, I just I just everyone should know that
the hero of today's episode is a chicken fucker and
no one's even going to care by the end of
this story. Yeah, because he's on the right side of history. Yeah. Now,

(27:14):
Larry Flint as a chicken fucking porn salesman is perhaps
an unlikely pick for the man who literally saved free
speech as we know it, but he is, in fact
the man who literally saved free speech as we know it.
His story is extremely well documented and you can find
a number of different write ups of what happened for
our purposes, and I'm going to quote the man, the myth,
the legend, the chicken rapist himself Larry Flint. This is

(27:37):
for an article he wrote the l A Times, Tucking
about the duel between him and Fallwell and how it
first began. I was publishing Hustler magazine, which most people
know has been pushing the envelope of taste from the
very beginning, and Folwell was blasting me. Every chance he
had he would talk about how I was a slime
deally responsible for the decay of all morals. He called
me every terrible name he could think of. Names is bad,
in my opinion, as any language used in my magazine.

(27:58):
After several years of listening to him bad me and
read his insults, I decided it was time to start
poking some fun at him. So he ran a parody
ad and Hustler, a take off on the then current
Campari ads, in which people were interviewed describing their first time.
In the ads, it ultimately became clear that the interviewees
were describing their first time sipping campari. But not in
our parody, we had fall Well describing his first time
as having been with his mother, drunk off our god

(28:20):
fearing asses in an outhouse. Pastor Fallwell did not take
this joke. Well, Oh, it's so crazy. He seems like
he would have such a good I think he'd be
able to laugh at himself with all the pranks he's
pulled on other people, like that hilarious burning down the street.

(28:41):
He did not find this funny, and he sued Larry
and his magazine for libel in Virginia. The lawsuits started
nineteen eighty three, not long after the Moral Majority found
themselves frustrated by Reagan waffling on tax exemptions in school prayer.
It's possible Jerry's hunger for a win as part of
what drove him in this endeavor. For a while the
case went well for him. Flint lost in the Jerry
trial and again in federal appeals court. Now, if Flint

(29:03):
had lost, he'd have had to pay Jerry two thousand
dollars for, in Larry's words, hurting his feelings. Um. He
wasn't willing to do this, and so he appealed to
the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he lost again.
So Larry appealed once but more uh, and that was
a decision with significant cost to him. He spent about
three million dollars in total on the lawsuits. But by

(29:27):
escalating at this high he also kind of risked the
First Amendment for everybody, um, which was a certainly a
complicated decision to weigh. Um because since it had been
escalated to the Supreme Court and like way out of
like Virginia politics. Um, that meant that, like, now, what
was at stake wasn't just a state level libel trial. Uh,
Larry was and he claims he didn't really think about

(29:48):
this at the time, taking a gamble with the entirety
of the First Amendment. UM. So now, like the case
was not just about like whether or not he'd violated
Virginia law, but whether or not the First Amendment protected
powerful people from being made fun of. Um. And that
like kind of was the core of the Supreme Court
case that Larry Flint waged against Jerry Falwell. And if

(30:10):
he'd lost, it would have essentially removed First Amendment protections
from the parody of public figures. Thankfully, for all of us,
but most particularly late night TV hosts, the Justice is
ruled that even gross and repugnant parody of a public
figure was protected by the First Amendment. I mean satire.
If we don't have satire, what do we have? And
that's what the Supreme Court decided, and so because of
Larry Flint, that's not something we even have to debate over.

(30:34):
It's like settled jurisprudence. Um. So that's good. Chief Justice
Request explained that had they ruled against Flint, all any
public figure would ever have to prove is that a
writer made them feel bad to sue them and their
publication into oblivion. Um, which yeah, would have brought about
the end of free speech as we know it. So
Larry Flint both gambled and saved free speech. Uh, in

(30:55):
the course of a couple of years. Goody, good for you, Larry. Yeah,
I'm gonna quote from Larry's right up again. Everyone was
shocked at our victory, and no one more so than Fallwell,
who on the day of the decision called me a
sleege merchant hiding behind the First Amendment. Still, over time,
Fallwell was forced to publicly come to grips with the
reality that this is America where you can make fun
of anyone you want. Yeah. Yeah. As the nineteen nineties

(31:17):
rolled along, the death toll from AIDS. Sorry we're getting
back to AIDS now. Yeah, you can't read that in
the same happy voice you just read that decision. Nope, nope.
Tone shifting is a real problem for me. But here
we are. The death toll from AIDS rose from to
the hundreds of thousands, partly as a consequence, mainstream America
began to gradually wake up to the idea that gay
people are human beings and maybe didn't deserve to be

(31:39):
abandoned to die horribly by a sociopathic government. Well, most
of the country slowly started to accept homosexual people as
fellow citizens. Jerry fall Will continue to be a huge
piece of ship. When the Clinton administration pushed forward its
healthcare reform plan, fall Will complain in a video that
this would allow AIDS patients to receive treatment without quote
any penalty for their abusive lie styles. What the fuck

(32:02):
he's like, if you live, I want you to be punished.
I want you to go to jail for the crime
costing government money to treat you having a relationship with
someone you love. What a human piece of shit? Yeah,
really a human piece of ship. Jerry Folwell in his
tax exempt church, he quoted right wing firebrand Rush Limbaugh

(32:25):
when the piladicted old bastard Wine that allowing gays in
the military would bankrupt the government due to the cost
of their AIDS care, and the parade of bigotry went
on from there. I'm going to quote from God's right
hand again. In nine, in a mailing sent out to
supporters of the Liberty Alliance, Folwell wrote that the Clinton
administration is set to award thousands and thousands of immigration
visas to foreigners who are infected with a lethal, fatal

(32:46):
and deadly AIDS virus. It's lethal, fatal and deadly sophia. Well,
but if it's well, the first to cancel each other out,
so it's really only the last one just deadly, just
really dodged a bullet there, so they can come to America.
That's right. The administration is putting the health, welfare, public
safety in life of every American at risk just so
these homo sexuals can hold an Olympic Games for gays

(33:08):
and lesbians and transvestites and bisexuals and pedophiles and sodomites
and exhibitionists and cross dressers and every other sexual deviant
on the planet with perverted proclivities. That is a long
less that is a lot. But also he doesn't know
shit about what people do. No, he does not uh no,
he does not. I will say that's actually one of
the things you've got to give Jerry Fowell that you

(33:29):
don't have to give his kids is he was morally consistent.
He believed shitty things and he lived shitty things, whereas
his kids just say shitty things. Yeah, and they don't
believe him. No, no, no, they don't at all. So yeah,
I don't know which is better, but there's no better.
It's a ship sandwich. It's a ship sandwich. Yeah. The

(33:51):
fundraising appeal warned that these deviants would infect Americans with
the AIDS virus before leaving to fame. Your pastors invade
your neighborhoods and recruit your children. Always comes back to that,
whether it's yeah, just teaching children to be gay, just
out there gay immigrants are going to recruit your kids.

(34:13):
The late nineteen nineties brought Larry Flint and Jerry Folwell
back together, this time as friends. Histories autist bromance started
in the nineteen episode of The Larry King Show. Flint
was promoting his recent autobiography, and Larry brought Fallwell out.
The pastor greeted his former rival warmly with literal hugs
and kisses. And then started dropping by his office on
visits to California. The two had a series of polite

(34:35):
debates on morality and First Amendment issues that went on
for nearly a decade. This is Larry Flint. In the
years that followed up and up until his death, he'd
come to see me every time he was in California.
We'd have interesting philosophical conversations. We'd exchanged personal Christmas cards,
He'd show me pictures of his grandchildren. I was with
him in Florida once when he complained about his health
and his weight, so I suggested he'd go on a
diet that worked for me. I faxed a copy to

(34:56):
his wife when I got back home. Now it's interesting
me because, like you kind of see the core of
Fallwell's issue. If Larry Flint had just been like a
poor guy running like a fly by night porn magazine
out of his apartment, fall Wall would never have wanted
to talk to him. But like, fundamentally, just respect another
white guy with money exactly. That's really what it is
for him. Yeah, Yeah, that's his primary loyalty is too

(35:19):
other rich guys with money like gross Gross in God's
right hand, Michael Winter's notes that Fallwell was constitutionally incapable
of eating healthy food. His favorite breakfast was a cheddar
cheese omelet with sausage, which he generally ate at a
Bob Evans restaurant near his church. Everybody looked at me
as soon as I said that, I've been getting that
ship since I was a kid growing up in the

(35:40):
fucking Yeah. As a now an elderly man in his
sixties and seventies, fall Will continued his brutal schedule, traveling
across the nation to preach, as well as running Liberty University,
raising funds, and of course preaching at his own church.
Agent illness did not slow him down, nor did it
put an end to his hot takes. Yeah, in Jerry
threw down one of the hottest takes in the history

(36:01):
of hot takes. The Teletubby's A surreal British Children show
that I don't really know how to summarize if you
have not seen it and aren't aware of what it
looked like, took America by storm that year. Most people
saw it as a weird but basically harmless way to
keep children entertained. Not Jerry, Jerry, Yeah, you remember this one.
The purple Teletubby. Yeah, he saw it as a sinister

(36:24):
attempt to infect the minds of young children with devilish
gay propaganda. I'm going to quote from God's right hand again.
Falwell's Liberty Journal discerned to sinister agenda regarding Tinky Winky.
He is purple, the gay Pride color, and his antenna
is shaped like a triangle, the gay Pride symbol, noted
the February issue. If that was not enough, Tinky Winky
carried a magic bag that Folwell's editors thought looked suspiciously

(36:46):
like a purse. Her to accuse the producers of intentionally
putting subtle depictions of gay sexuality in the show, and
said that such role modeling of the gay lifestyle was
damaging to the moral lives of children. Again, such nerds,
such fucking nerds, gigantic, fucking nerds, and the way Larry
Flint summarizes this issue is fucking hysterical to me. When

(37:10):
he was getting blasted for his ridiculous homophobic comments after
he wrote his Tinky Winky article cautioning parents that the
purple Teletubby character was in fact gay, I called him
in Florida and yelled at him to leave the tinky
winkies alone. Oh my god, Larry Flints. That's amazing. Mm hmm.
You know what else is amazing, Sophia, These goods and services,

(37:33):
products and services. Sorry, we don't sell goods on this show.
Goods in our products and products are goods products. We're back.
I'm taking some flak from Sophie, but I've still got

(37:55):
my bagel sling. Oh yeah, it's gonna do some damage, Sophie,
gonna do some damage. So there were some signs over
the years that Jerry Fallwell might soften his attitude towards
homosexuality in the same way he reversed his opinion on segregation.
One of these was the torture and murder of Matthew

(38:15):
Shepard in October of nineteen. Fred Phelps in the Westboro
Baptist Church, being giant pieces of ship, protested Shepherd's funeral.
Jerry Fallwell, being a slightly smaller piece of ship, had
enough human decency to be sickened by this. He got
together with a Christian pro gay activist to hold a
summit on non violence within the evangelical community. Literally the hey,

(38:36):
we should stop murdering gay people. Maybe, yeah, we should
talk about murdering gay people, which you know, it took
him what six years, four to five years when he
had that epiphany about segregation, So you know, he was
really turning it over in his head. Is it wrong
for us to murder gay people? Yeah? Yeah, he was. Really,

(38:57):
He's like, I'm gonna take my time on this. Yeah,
he really it. So Fallwell failed refused to reconsider his
position that homosexuality went against the Bible and the will
of God. But he did stand in front of a
pastichiou photos of murdered gay people and state his desire
for peace inside both camps. Are people more interested in
peace than in war and glorifying God than in getting
their point across. He mentioned his friendship with Larry Flint

(39:20):
as evidence that he and his ministry supported love for people,
regardless of whether he approved of their behavior. He said
to the gay community, we have not done that with you.
We apologize for that, we ask your forgiveness for that.
So yea yeay, it's the right ish thing done eventually
kind of sort of, let's read the next paragraph. Folwell

(39:46):
supported George W. Bush in the two thousand election. However,
he was not the same force that he had been
in the nineteen eighty election. For one thing, he was
older and less influential, but the religious right he organized
and formed into a weapon of political domination had only
grown more powerful. George Bush lost one with the help
of evangelical Christianity, and his administration would cater to them

(40:06):
in a more direct way than the Reagan administration had,
particularly with things like the proposed Defensive Marriage Act. As
you might expect, Jerry's reaction to the terrorist attacks on
September eleven, two one were uniquely shitty. While most of
America grieved and worked to process their fear and rage
and the wake of the most spectacularly deadly terrorist attack
in history, Jerry lashed out at who else, gay people? Yeah,

(40:29):
you get it, you're really getting a feel for this guy. Well,
I just also remember this. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Two days after the attack, while guesting on Pat Robertson's
show The Seven hundred Club, Folwell said, this, what we
saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be
miniscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain
and allow the enemies of America to give us probably
what we deserve. Pat, who was also a huge piece

(40:52):
of ship, Agreed, Jerry, that's my feeling, and I feel
we've just seen the anti chamber to terror. We haven't
even begun to see what they can do to the
major population. And shortly after that, I fall all got
down to explaining who he thought was really to blame
for all this. The abortionists have got to bear some
burden for this, because God will not be mocked. And
when we destroy forty million little innocent babies, we make
God mad. I really believe that the Pagans and the

(41:13):
abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians
who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle,
the a C L you people for the American way,
all of them have tried to secularize America. I point
the finger in their face and say, you help this happen.
I mean, there's helping the country. Hell, you know what
I mean. Things. What I love about the wake of

(41:35):
nine eleven is how it brought us all together. Ye
really made us the best version of ourselves. Yeah, Yeah,
what a what a beautiful way. If only we could
get back to that. Yeah, how can we be the
people we were at that moment? Yeah, before we blamed ourselves,
and when we blamed everyone else women and abolitionists, and yeah,

(41:56):
the a c l U and gay c LU. I
mean there's an extent to which that we could just
take this, we could like adopt this as kind of
an empowering statement, like, yeah, we did make nine eleven
half and guys, we fucked those towers up. Good good
on us? Oh my god, So what's it like? What's

(42:17):
the weather like in in your end of Canceledania? Right now?
I will let you know when my I helped cause
nine eleven t shirts gone sale at public Sophie, how
how close are we to getting those out? She just said,
fucking kill me? And I appreciate that these comments caused

(42:37):
an uproar, which was not enough to stop President Bush
from inviting Jerry Fallwell to speak at the National Cathedral
that year. Shortly after that, fall will release a non
apology apology. Despite the impressions some may have from news
reports today, I hold no one other than the terrorists
and the people and nations who have enabled and harbored
them responsible for Tuesday's attack on this nation. I sincerely
regret that the comments I made during a long theological

(42:59):
discussion on a Christian television program yesterday. We're taken out
of their context and reported that my thoughts reduced to
sound bites, have detracted from the spirit of this day
of morning. Okay, that's a bly. We all heard what
you said. What you know doesn't strike you as a
real apology. The fact that there's no I'm sorry in there.
But all he said was you helped this happen. He's
not saying that they committed nine eleven. They just enabled

(43:21):
nine eleven. You wouldn't arrest a guy for enabling a murderer, right, Yes,
that's conspiracy to commit murder. And then it does sound
like Jerry Fowl was accusing that kind of does sound
like that by our new I helped enabled nine eleven shirts.

(43:42):
Not a fan of this one. I want to take
the bagel sling so bad. Aim at your stupid face
right now. Oh, the shirt could be somebody knocking down
the North Tower with a bagel from Robert You're fucking fired. Stop.

(44:04):
I'm gonna be in Cansylvania by nightfall. Area. Yeah, you're
in the lowest levels of Pennsylvania right now. LOUI c
k is several floors above you. What does this mean
that iss and sorry is going to open for me? Now? No,
he is doing better than you. You would hope to open,
and you're not allowed. Yeah, you'r Weinstein level. Cosby is

(44:28):
in your kitchen making you t right now, let me
try my canceled apology. Okay, I am sorry that comments
I made about me causing nine eleven were taken out
of context by you and that it offended you. I
am sorry that you were offended by the things that

(44:49):
were said by someone who may have been me, But
I do not apologize specifically for the statement itself, or
for its intent or for its intent. Was that a
good apology? Yes? I feel a lot better, Thank you.
I learned a lot from the people that I've written about.
So uh yeah. Well, the neo cons Fallwell had helped

(45:12):
into office launched two disastrous, very poorly waged and executed
wars that crippled our military and loaded future generations down
with unspeakable debt. Jerry Fallwell spent his last few years
seeing to his empire. In two thousand four, he opened
a law school at Liberty University, stating we planned to
turn out conservative lawyers the same way Harvard turns out liberals,
notable leftist Bastion Harvard, and two thousand five, his health

(45:37):
took a sharp down swing. He suffered a heart attack,
which he unfortunately survived. He recovered, but took this as
a sign that he should start preparing to hand over
the reins of his empire to his son, Jerry Jr.
Why don't you take that as a sign that you're
being evil. It's like nine eleven the Gays caused what
did how? How did you cause your own heart attack? Buddy?
Is it too much hate? They never never seemed to

(45:59):
really think that God did that because they were bad.
That is weird, super strange. Yeah, even in the twilight
of his life, Jerry Fall will continue to play shitty
pranks on people. Oh my god, one more prank story.
Oh my god, I'm gonna quote from God's right Hare.

(46:21):
He just joked about murdering people. He drove his suv
around campus, developing a new prank of revving the motorate
students as they walked in front of the Vehicle's great,
but that's threatening to run children over with your car.
I love the ship. All shitty people have the same
definition of prank, and it's making people fear for their lives. Yeah,

(46:44):
it's beautiful. He equipped his suv with an especially loud
horn that he would blow it unsuspecting pedestrians. What a dick.
That's at least closer to a prank. What a fucking dick.
On Mai seven, Jerry fall Will ate breakfast at the
Bob Evans restaurant near his house. Afterwards, he entered his
office and suffered a massive heart attack. Thankfully, the paramedics
failed to revive him this time, and he stayed dead.

(47:07):
And that, Praise the Lord, is the end of Jerry
Folwell story. But it is not the end of the
Fallwell story. And it was only the beginning of the
story of the institution known as Liberty University. But that,
my friends, is a story that will have to wait
for another week. But I have it written here, Sophia.
How you feeling I mean refreshed? Because now, he said,

(47:31):
I feel like there's only one way to really celebrate
the death of Jerry Fallwell. If that bagel hits either
of us, I will punch you in the nuts. You'll
be right to do so. And okay, it's a deal.
I fell behind you. You don't even deserve to throw
it It's like the erectile dysfunction of bagel throwing right
out of the hoop. Alright, alright, guys, it's gonna happen

(47:55):
now there's no star. Yeah, that was dangerously your Sophie's head.
It was anything you do with a sling and a
tiny enclosed recording studio is going to be dangerous. I
mean if one day Sophie slips something in your drink
and you deserve it, you have a massive heart attack

(48:15):
after eating Bob Jones diner dinner. I mean, you're gonna
get your us right, the cheese omelet with sausage, and
then you're gonna have a nice Now, a hater attack
causes your heart attack. Hater tach hater tech. All right,
I have to leave. I feel like hate kept alive. Yep,

(48:37):
you want to plug your plug doubles? Sure? Um. You
guys can find me on Twitter and Instagram at the
Sophia so f I y A, and you can find
me co hosting private parts of Known, my podcast with
Corney Kosak about love and sexuality around the world, and
for Twenty Day Fiance, my podcast with Miles Gray about

(48:58):
ninety day fiance. And you can find me on the
internet at behind the Bastards dot com, where we'll have
all of the sources for this. I'd also like to
say special thanks to Corey who made this wonderful sling
that has improved all of our days. Burn in hell, Corey,
you burn in hell. And if someone wants to um

(49:20):
draw fan art of George Clooney and No Wiley kissing,
touching penises whatever taking down the World Trade Center, please
tweet that at me. What the fuck? Tune that at me?
And also cancel Robert Cashtag, Cancel Robert, cancel Roberts uh

(49:42):
t shirts, public dot com, at Bastards pod, Twitter and Instagram.
I'm I right okay on Twitter, where you can tell
me that I'm canceled to my digital face. And this
is the end of the episode. Is not the end
of the episode? What else do we do? Sophie? We
have another podcast Katie Stolen Cody Johnston. We have another

(50:02):
podcast with Katie Stolen Cody Johnston called NPRS Radio Lab.
Oh no, we actually we actually we actually we actually
beat them last week in the ratings worst year ever.
All right, you brought it back. I like that. I
like that. Here's your bagel. I gotta bagel. All right,

(50:23):
I'm gonna throw it one more time. This is This
one's for you, Corey. Feel like it's coming from me.
You're trying to get something here, which I do not.
I can't. I've gently kicked it towards you now, all right,
Well that's all the bagel throwing I'm gonna do today
with this link. Thanks Corey,