Jerry Falwell is a prominent Southern Baptist Jesus freak, in addition to the whitest man who ever lived. He is famous for making ignorant and offensive pronouncements which are often followed by retractions and halfhearted apologies.
Falwell has built a shtick out of making ridiculously offensive statements about his detractors. A shining example of this was the statement he made two days after the 9-11 terror attacks, while the wreckage at Ground Zero was still smoking:
"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the 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, I point the finger in their face and say: you helped this happen."
After withstanding a couple of days of tremendous public denunciations (even from conservative ally Rush Limbaugh), Falwell was ultimately forced to issue a non-apology. He tried his best to defuse the situation without actually backing down: "I would never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians or anyone else, I apologize."
Except that his statement explicitly did blame people other than the terrorists. Lots of them. The same people, in fact, that Falwell's continually blamed for America's problems ever since founding the Moral Majority in 1979.
Falwell once proclaimed: "I have a Divine Mandate to go into the halls of Congress and fight for laws that will save America." Accordingly, the Moral Majority was conceived as a tool to provide leverage for Falwell to influence the Republican party platform and help their candidates to get elected.
His mission? "We must, from the highest office in the land right down to the shoeshine boy in the airport, have a return to Biblical basics."
Falwell's strategy was to create a voting block of Christian conservatives and insinuate them into the Republican party. So he urged fundamentalists and evangelicals to set aside their differences and mobilize under his unifying banner. The Moral Majority's rank-and-file members were expected to vote the way Jerry told them. "Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions," he explained.
The Moral Majority began with fighting the Equal Rights Amendment tooth and nail. In typical Falwell fashion, he went out of his way to antagonize its proponents:
"I listen to feminists and all these radical gals... These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men; that's their problem."
The Moral Majority campaigned for public school reform, by which they meant the inclusion of creationism in science curricula and state-sanctioned prayer in the classroom. They also opposed the SALT treaties and nuclear disarmament in general.
continued http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/religion/televangelists/jerry-falwell/