Baptists From The United States

"Pat, did you notice yesterday the ACLU, and all the Christ-haters, People For the American Way, NOW, etc. were totally disregarded by the Democrats and the Republicans in both houses of Congress as they went out on the steps and called out on to God in prayer and sang "God Bless America" and said "let the ACLU be hanged"? In other words, when the nation is on its knees, the only normal and natural and spiritual thing to do is what we ought to be doing all the time — calling upon God."

"And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. 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.""

"The true Negro does not want integration ... He realizes his potential is far better among his own race ... It will destroy our race eventually ... In one northern city, a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife ... It boils down to whether we are going to take God's Word as final."

"I think Muhammad was a terrorist. I read enough by both Muslims and non-Muslims, [to decide] that he was a violent man, a man of war."

"This is probably as bad a day as the court has had on social issues since '."

"You've got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops and I am for the President—chase them all over the world, if it takes ten years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord."

"And the fact that John Kerry would not support a federal marriage amendment [prohibiting gay marriage], it equates in our minds as someone 150 years ago saying I'm personally opposed to slavery, but if my neighbor wants to own one or two that's OK. We don't buy that."

"While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order."

"On Tuesday, May 14, the old fat false prophet Jerry Falwell died and entered hell. As the old preacher used to put it, he split hell wide open... Hell from beneath was moved to meet Falwell at his coming, rousing the dead, even those that used to be big-shots on Earth, now in hell, greeting him with such words as these: 'Why, hello, Reverend Fraudwell, you old money-grubbing pervert!' ... As a young preacher in Springfield, Missouri, Falwell was a true Calvinistic Baptist preacher who believed and preached the truth. But he saw early on that his lust for power and lucre could never be satisfied if he was faithful to the word of God. And so the old fool, like the false prophet Balaam, sold his soul for a mess of free will-ism, God loves everybody-ism, Arminianism, lies -- sold his soul for lies.""

"I recognize and celebrate that our country is founded upon Judeo-Christian values, and I have pledged my life to defend America and all her values, the values that have made us the noblest experiment in history. But public — but political intolerance by any political party is neither a Judeo-Christian nor an American value. … The political tactics of division and slander are not our values. They are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country. Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right."

"If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox."

"The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you’ll just get yourself called Reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God’s punishment if they hadn’t got some kind of clerical qualification. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup."

"I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass."

"At its apex in 1979, Falwell's Old-Time Gospel Hour raised $37 million on 2.5 million appeals, a sum unimaginable for a gay organization. Yet throughout the 19705, the show was in and out of receivership. The pressure of mounting debt drove Falwell, whose penchant for overspending was as great as his gift for overstatement, to rely ever more heavily on solicitations stressing the alleged gay threat to American families. As Falwell's financial problems forced him to retreat from the public stage, the religious right's baton passed to the biblical reconstructionist Pat Robertson. Though he owed much to Falwell's trailblazing evangelism, Robertson, who practiced faith healing and speaking in tongues, would soon eclipse him as an entrepreneur and political preacher. Vowing not to repeat Falwell's mistakes, Robertson allowed the Christian Broadcasting Network to grow at a slow but steady rate. Until 1984, when he changed his party registration from Democratic to Republican, he largely abstained from Falwell's vituperative style of political activism."

"While the outbreak of the mysterious and deadly disease in the early 1980s spurred many religiously motivated caregivers to new heights of compassion, Falwell used it to craft new fundraising appeals. In AIDS, religious conservatives like Falwell found the punitive manifestation for homosexual behavior for which they had been searching. No longer, they reasoned, could homosexuals pretend that homosexuality was without consequences. AIDS and homosexuality would become virtually synonymous in the rhetoric of the religious right and in the nation's consciousness. Ignoring the inconvenient facts that many people with AIDS are not gay, that the vast majority of gay men would never contract HIV, and that lesbians are at extremely low risk, Falwell and his colleagues on the right played AIDS as divine retribution for sodomy. In a 1987 fund-raising letter, for instance, Falwell accused gay men of donating blood because "they know they are going to die--and they are going to take as many people with them as they can.""

"Falwell generally escaped censure for such blatant contradictions because the press was often reluctant to take him to task. When his statements and motives were called into question, he has adhered to the premise that the best defense is a good offense. Instead of answering the substance of charges, Falwell would simply suggest darkly that his critics were part of a liberal conspiracy to repress the role of Christians in government. Responding to attacks on his political views in a 1976 sermon, Falwell said, "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.""

"For Falwell and the religious right, the tension between adhering to a literal interpretation of the Bible and allowing the compromise inherent in mainstream politics never fully eased. In a pluralistic democracy, the voice of every participant has a priori equal standing. Yet with its insistence on the inerrancy of the Bible in public policy, the religious right raised the specter of theocracy. To deal with the competing demands--theological and political--Falwell, like Pat Robertson later in the 1980s, simply opted to adopt two contradictory positions, one intended for his core audience and one suited for public consumption, and hoped no one would notice. After backing Briggs's and Bryant's campaign to ban gays and lesbians from teaching positions in the public schools and repeatedly in sermons and fund-raising letters harping on the homosexual threat to children, Falwell told the Washington Post, "I have no objection to a homosexual teaching in the classroom as long as that homosexual is not flaunting his lifestyle or soliciting students.""

"So what’s to be done right now? The social dominators and high RWAs presently marshaling their forces for the next election in your county, state and country, are perfectly entitled to do what they’re doing. They have the right to organize, they have the right to proselytize, they have the right to select and work for candidates they like, they have the right to vote, they have the right to make sure folks who agree with them also vote. Jerry Falwell has already declared, "We absolutely are going to deliver this nation back to God in 2008!" If the people who are not social dominators and right-wing authoritarians want to have those same rights in the future, they, you, had better do those same things too, now. You do have the right to remain silent, but you’ll do so at everyone’s peril. You can't sit these elections out and say "Politics is dirty; I’ll not be part of it,” or “Nothing can change the way things are done now." The social dominators want you to be disgusted with politics, they want you to feel hopeless, they want you out of their way. They want democracy to fail, they want your freedoms stricken, they want equality destroyed as a value, they want to control everything and everybody, they want it all. And they have an army of authoritarian followers marching with the militancy of “that old-time religion” on a crusade that will make it happen, if you let them. Research shows most people are not in this army. However Americans have, for the most part, been standing on the sidewalk quietly staring at this authoritarian parade as it marches on."

"I believe in the premillenial, pre-tribulational coming of Christ for all of his church, and to summarize that, your first poll, do you believe Jesus coming the second time will be in the future, I would vote yes with the 59 percent and with Billy Graham and most evangelicals. The second question, you asked, "Do you think he is coming in your lifetime?" I would vote neither yes nor no. I would vote I do not know, because Jesus said, "No man knows the day or the hour." So the bottom line is, I believe that we ought to be living every day as though this is the crowning day. But we should also be planning and working with the next generation in mind, because we do not know."

"Since Jesus came to the earth the first time 2,000 years ago as a Jewish male, many evangelicals believe the Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male. This belief is 2,000 years old and has no anti-Semitic roots. This is simply historic and prophetic orthodox Christian doctrine that many theologians, Christian and non-Christian, have understood for two millennia."

"Thank God for these gay demonstrators. If I didn't have them, I'd have to invent them. They give me all the publicity I need."

"You know, you almost got to be a homosexual to be recognized in the entertainment industry anymore. Ellen [Degeneres], and all the rest. I love them, pray for their souls, but they're immoral. And the Hollywood scene — five and eight and 10 marriages — not something to be emulated."

"Today the world has gone sex crazy. Illicit sex has become the downfall of many in the Bible. Movie stars not married to each other, having babies and making headlines all over the world as though they were doing some great thing. Big deal! Just another moral pervert. And for them to become heroes for our kids. My wife and I will be married 49 years the next anniversary."

"I have been on record all 54 years of my ministry as being opposed to dual covenant theology... I simply cannot alter my deeply held belief in the exclusivity of salvation through the Gospel of Christ for the sake of political or theological expediency. Like the Apostle Paul, I pray daily for the salvation of everyone, including the Jewish people."

"Regardless of the response from the Jewish person, we remain friends in support of the State of Israel as required by scripture."

"The fact that Marc Cherry's a gay Republican means he should join the Democratic Party."

"In the months after the Civil War, slavery remained constitutional and African Americans were still not guaranteed the right to vote or even to count themselves as citizens. The states of the Confederacy were beaten, but there was no consensus on how to readmit them to the Union. Republicans dominated Congress, but the President—Andrew Johnson—was a southern Democrat. The Era of Reconstruction began on this confused footing, but with one brilliant Pennsylvanian ready to fight for what he believed. That man was Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Lancaster... No other man of his era did as much to guarantee the rights of citizenship for African Americans. Decades before the Civil War, Stevens advocated full equality for black people. In Congress after the war, he very nearly had the power to make that happen. He understood that laws alone could not ensure racial equality and strenuously urged the utter destruction of the old southern elites so that a new order could be built. That was too much for his contemporaries, and the Civil Rights Movement was left for a later generation. Disappointed, Stevens said that he would 'take all I can get in the cause of humanity and leave it to be perfected by better men in better times'. Stevens would have taken great pleasure in knowing that the 'better man' was a black man from a Southern state. He would have taken no pleasure at all in knowing that the 'better times' were a century away... Thaddeus Stevens was a man before his time. As early as the 1830s he was using his own money to buy slaves' freedom and defending free blacks in court at no charge. His true goal was not an end to slavery, but actual equality among the races. He even protested California's discrimination against Chinese immigrants and argued for more humane treatment of Indians—positions virtually unheard of in his day. Stevens was born in poverty, but rose to become possibly the most powerful man in America. Frustrated and even bitter, Stevens died in 1868 having done much for African Americans but having made few friends. He is buried in a small cemetery on Mulberry Street in Lancaster; the only one he could find that did not racially discriminate. He wrote his own epitaph."

"Thaddeus Stevens, not only did he oppose all things Democrat, he was one of the greatest Republicans who ever lived."

"During the Civil War, one of the nation's leading abolitionists was Republican Senator Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, who would later serve as vice president during President Grant's second term. In December 1861, Mr. Wilson introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the District. The measure met with parliamentary obstacles from the adamantly pro-slavery Democratic Party, whom Republicans in those days referred to as the 'Slave-ocrats'. Most Democrats in Congress having resigned in order to join the Confederate rebellion, Wilson's measure sailed through the Senate. The abolitionist senator responsible for outmaneuvering Democrat opposition was Ben Wade, the Ohio Republican who six years later would have assumed the presidency had the bitterly racist Democratic President, Andrew Johnson, been convicted during his impeachment trial. In the House of Representatives, Democrats delayed passage with a series of stalling tactics. Finally, the majority leader, Thaddeus Stevens, bulldozed over Democrat opposition by calling the House into a committee of the whole. He stopped all other business in the House until Democrats relented and allowed a vote on the bill. Stevens, of Pennsylvania, is best known for his 'forty acres and a mule' proposal. Overall, 99 percent of Republicans in Congress voted to free the slaves in the District of Columbia, and 83 percent of Democrats voted to keep them in chains."

"After the Civil War, Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican, urged the federal government to seize the estates of wealthy former Confederates and use them in part to provide freedmen with some small compensation for centuries of forced labor. Stevens warned that without economic empowerment, freedmen would eventually find themselves at the mercy of their former masters. "It is impossible that any practical equality of rights can exist where a few thousand men monopolize the whole landed property," Stevens wrote in 1865. "The whole fabric of Southern society must be changed, and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never be, as it never has been, a true republic"...Thaddeus Stevens knew that without sufficient economic power, civic equality becomes difficult to maintain. His insight has proved remarkably durable across American history. The question now is whether a new coalition, radicalized by racism, can defy that history."

"When Chase, Summer, Stevens, and Wilson talk to the negro of the importance of having the franchise, and stop short of giving the franchise to woman, I proclaim them hypocrites—I proclaim them politicians. They speak so to the newly freed slave, because he has already the ballot in his hands, and they want him to vote for them. We have not that right, and hence they do not speak one word in favor of our attaining the elective franchise."

"Thaddeus Stevens, that great fighter for human freedom, was an uncompromising Abolitionist. The slaveowners and bankers of his time called him a revolutionist. Deeply interested in education, he started the first vocational training school for boys, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He helped establish the free public school system in Pennsylvania, and fought for equal educational opportunities for the Negro people. His championship of social as well as political equality for Negroes was the real reason for the family's disapproval of him."

"In this study the term "abolitionist" will be applied to those Americans who before the Civil War had agitated for immediate, unconditional, and universal abolition of slavery in the United States. Contemporaries of the antislavery movement and later historians have sometimes mistakenly used the word "abolitionist" to describe adherents of the whole spectrum of antislavery sentiment. Members of the Free Soil and Republican parties have often been called abolitionists, even though these parties were pledged officially before 1861 only to the limitation of slavery, not to its extirpation. It is a moot question whether such radical anti-slavery leaders such as Charles Sumner, John Andrew, George Julian, Thaddeus Stevens, or Owen Lovejoy were genuine "abolitionists". In their hearts they probably desired an immediate end to slavery as fervently as did William Lloyd Garrison. But they were committed publicly by political affiliation and party responsibility to a set of principles that fell short of genuine abolitionism."

"Thaddeus Stevens, the clearest-headed leader of this attempt at industrial democracy, made his last speech, impeaching Andrew Johnson on February 16, and on February 23 I was born."

"God give to Vermont another son; Lancaster, another citizen; Pennsylvania, another statesman; the country, another patriot; the poor, another friend; the freedmen, another advocate; the race, another benefactor; and the world, another man like Thaddeus Stevens."

"Whoever cracked Thaddeus Stevens' skull would let out the brains of the Republican Party."

"All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people."

"He that hath a trade, hath an estate."

"Oh, how you have longed to say that to me. You claim you trust them but you know what the people are. You know that the inner compass that should direct the soul toward justice has ossified in white men and women, north and south, unto utter uselessness through tolerating the evil of slavery. White people cannot bear the thought of sharing this country's infinite abundance with Negroes."

"Ah, shit on the people and what they want and what they’re ready for! I don’t give a goddamn about the people and what they want! This is the face of someone who has fought long and hard for the good of the people without caring much for any of ‘em. And I look a lot worse without the wig. The people elected me! To represent them! To lead them! And I lead! You ought to try it!"

"When the war ends, I intend to push for full equality, the Negro vote and much more. Congress shall mandate the seizure of every foot of rebel land and every dollar of their property. We’ll use their confiscated wealth to establish hundreds of thousands of free Negro farmers, and at their side soldiers armed to occupy and transform the heritage of traitors. We'll build up a land down there of free men and free women and free children and freedom. The nation needs to know that we have such plans."

"I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR."

"It is said the South will never submit — that we cannot conquer the rebels — that they will suffer themselves to be slaughtered, and their whole country to be laid waste. Sir, war is a grievous thing at best, and civil war more than any other ; but if they hold this language, and the means which they have suggested must be resorted to ; if their whole country must be laid waste and made a desert, in order to save this Union from destruction, so let it be. I would rather, Sir, reduce them to a condition where their whole country is to be re-peopled by a band of freemen, than to see them perpetrate the destruction of this people through our agency. I do not say it is time to resort to such means, and I do not say that the time will come, but I never fear to express my sentiments. It is not a question with me of policy, but a question of principle."

"I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: "Here lies one who never rose to any eminence, who only courted the low ambition to have it said that he striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color.""

"Our object should be not only to end this terrible war now, but to prevent its recurrence. All must admit that slavery is the cause of it. Without slavery we should this day be a united and happy people... The principles of our Republic are wholly incompatible with slavery."

"Every humane and patriotic heart must grieve to see a bloody and causeless rebellion, costing thousands of human lives and millions of treasure. But as it was predetermined and inevitable, it was long enough delayed. Now is the appropriate time to solve the greatest problem ever submitted to civilized man."

"It is my purpose nowhere in these remarks to make personal reproaches; I entertain no ill-will toward any human being, nor any brute, that I know of, not even the skunk across the way to which I referred. Least of all would I reproach the South. I honor her courage and fidelity. Even in a bad, a wicked cause, she shows a united front. All her sons are faithful to the cause of human bondage, because it is their cause. But the North - the poor, timid, mercenary, driveling North - has no such united defenders of her cause, although it is the cause of human liberty. None of the bright lights of the nation shine upon her section. Even her own great men have turned her accusers. She is the victim of low ambition - an ambition which prefers self to country, personal aggrandizement to the high cause of human liberty. She is offered up a sacrifice to propitiate southern tyranny - to conciliate southern treason."

"There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty. Fanaticism is excessive zeal. There may be, and have been fanatics in false religion – in the bloody religions of the heathen. There are fanatics in superstition. But there can be no fanatic, however warm their zeal, in the true religion, even although you sell your goods and bestow your money on the poor, and go on and follow your heart your Master. There may, and every hour shows around me, fanatics in the cause of false liberty – that infamous liberty which justifies human bondage, that liberty whose ‘corner-stone is slavery.’ But there can be no fanaticism however high the enthusiasm, in the cause of rational, universal liberty – the liberty of the Declaration of Independence."

"I can never acknowledge the right of slavery. I will bow down to no deity however worshipped by professing Christians — however dignified by the name of the Goddess of Liberty, whose footstool is the crushed necks of the groaning millions, and who rejoices in the resoundings of the tyrant’s lash, and the cries of his tortured victims."

"I wished that I were the owner of every southern slave, that I might cast off the shackles from their limbs, and witness the rapture which would excite them in the first dance of their freedom."