Famed Televangelist Dies at Age 73[/align][/align]By SUE LINDSEY[/align]AP[/align]
LYNCHBURG, Va. (May 15) - The Rev.
Jerry Falwell , known both for his scathing comments linking the Sept. 11 attacks to homosexuality and liberals and for shaping the conservative Christian right into a major force in U.S. politics during the Reagan years, died Tuesday. He was at 73.
[/align]
Religion, Politics and Controversy[/align]
[/align][/align][/align][/align][/align][/align][/align][/align]Falwell was discovered without a pulse in his office at Liberty University and pronounced dead at a hospital an hour later. Dr. Carl Moore, Falwell 's physician, said he had a heart condition and presumably died of a heart rhythm abnormality.
Driven into politics by the 1973
Supreme Court ruling that established the right to an abortion, Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. One of the conservative lobbying group's greatest triumphs came just a year later, when
Ronald Reagan was elected president.
[/align]
voters registered, aiding in Reagan's victory and giving Republicans control of the
Senate.
"I shudder to think where the country would be right now if the religious right had not evolved," he said when he stepped down as Moral Majority president in 1987.
Fellow TV evangelist
Pat Robertson, himself a one-time
Republican candidate for president, declared Falwell "a tower of strength on many of the moral issues which have confronted our nation."
The rise of Christian conservatism - and the Moral Majority's full-throated condemnation of homosexuality, abortion and pornography - made Falwell perhaps the most recognizable figure on the evangelical right, and one of the most controversial ones, too.
Over the years, Falwell waged a landmark libel case against Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt over a raunchy parody ad, and created a furor in 1999 when one of his publications suggested that the purse-carrying "Teletubbies" character Tinky Winky was gay.
Matt Foreman, executive director of National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, extended condolences to those close to Falwell , but added: "Unfortunately, we will always remember him as a founder and leader of America's anti-gay industry, someone who exacerbated the nation's appalling response to the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, someone who demonized and vilified us for political gain and someone who used religion to divide rather than unite our nation."
The 1980s marked the religious conservative movement's high-water mark. In more recent years, Falwell had become a problematic figure for the Republican. His remarks a few days after Sept. 11, 2001, essentially blaming feminists, gays and liberals for bringing on the terrorist attacks drew a rebuke from the White House, and he apologized.
Falwell 's declining political star seemed apparent when he quietly led in and out of the Republican Party's 2004 national convention. Just four years earlier, he was invited to pray from the rostrum.
[/align][/align][/align][/align]
[/align]
[/align][/align][/align][/align][/align][/align]
Jerry Falwell Died Today
