This is a guest post from Rebecca.
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Recently Delawareliberals have been attacked for intolerance when we refused to mourn the death The Reverend Falwell. Historically, we’ve been attacked for being overly tolerant and flip-floppers who can’t define what we believe, so we must not believe in anything. As usual, this whole load of bunkum stems from specious logic as applied by the right-wing noise machine.
Liberals believe in tolerance. So it logically follows that intolerance is unacceptable to us. The Reverend Falwell was the poster-boy for intolerance. Even Tinky-Winky fell prey to his attacks. Blaming the 9/11 disaster on homosexuals, instead of say the folks who were warned of the impending attack but preferred to spend vacation in Crawford, was pure bigotry. Carefully crafted bigotry designed to distract fellow bigots from those who really were indirectly responsible.
Liberals also abhor hypocrisy. So logically it follows that we would not mourn for The Reverend Falwell. One of the things that makes us crazy is the hypocrisy of people who claim to be Christians but daily violate the teachings of Christ. Playing on people’s fears to wring money from them in order to build up personal earthly treasures certainly wasn’t part of the Christian message.
Now the right-wingers will say you’ve told us what you are against but what are you for? Okay, liberals are for Christ’s teachings. Like, look after each other. Like, take care of the poor. Like, respect women. Like, get the money out of the church. Like tolerance and truthfulness. The Sermon on the Mount could almost be the Liberal Creed. And yes, even those of us who haven’t been born again, or accepted Christ as our personal savior, can read those words and adopt them as a compass for our lives. They are great words, whether they are from God or just from a wonderful, thoughtful man. Too bad The Reverend Falwell didn’t adopt them as his personal compass.
We, in fact, do have standards, values and beliefs. And we are not hypocritical enough to pretend sorrow when somebody who has stood against those beliefs has died. We certainly feel pity for those who loved him and are hurting now, but we aren’t part of that group.
Onward!