Jerry Falwell is easily outwitted

In his “Falwell Confidential” (not particularly confidential, of course; Google it if you’re interested) for September 16, Jerry Falwell makes the following outrageous statement:

“No matter the outcome of this case, the fact remains that our nation is being stripped of its prominent religious heritage — a heritage embraced by our Founders and by many generations. If the militant secularists want to redefine this nation in their own Godless imagine, they should at least be honest with the American people and admit that they are contradicting our nation’s extensive history of government-endorsed public religious expression, including National Days of Prayer, ‘In God We Trust’ on our coinage, acknowledgment of the Creator in our Constitution and in countless other areas.”

As usual, Falwell has his facts partially correct. We do allow “In God We Trust” to be imprinted on our money---which, it seems to me, no Christian, “rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” should be in favor of. And for some reason no one has ever mounted a court challenge to the ridiculous law (most recently passed in 1988) providing for a “National Day of Prayer” (I usually observe it as the one day of the year that I refrain from my normal prayer discipline).

BUT FALWELL, in his inimitable style of ignorance (or is it simply his calculated attempt to mislead the ignorant public that reads his nonsense), posits that our Constitution acknowledges the Creator.

No one’s creator, by any name, is, of course, named in the Constitution. Do I need to give a civics lesson here? God is not mentioned, nor is Allah, or Vishnu, nor any other deity. Unfortunately Falwell knows only too well the level of ignorance among his followers, and he knows that he can continue forever feeding this kind of wrong information to them to continue to fan the flames of fundamentalism.