Falwell’s Greatest Hits

(sigh)

I guess I should have expected it. We do live in North Carolina, Buckle of the Bible Belt. (I just coined that, if you use it I expect royalties!)

Rev. Mike Turner, of the First Baptist Church here in town eulogizes Falwell in the Daily News.

From the article:

Whether Catholic or Baptist or something in between, many people – maybe more than we’ll ever know – admired and followed the fundamentalist preacher from Lynchburg, Va. Over the last 30 years, Falwell’s was the nation’s loudest voice for traditional values. On issues like abortion, homosexuality and church-state relations, the news media invariably sought him out to speak for the conservative Christian perspective. And Falwell never let them down; he had an opinion on everything.

Well, that’s all pretty true. Millions of Americans did indeed admire and follow Falwell and his teachings. I suspect the good reverend and I will disagree on whether Falwell’s influence was a positive one for the country.

Turner continues the thought with the next paragraph.

Even his missteps – and there were many, from the fiasco surrounding Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and their PTL ministries to his lawsuit against Larry Flynt and “Hustler” magazine – didn’t in the end diminish the scope of his influence or the scale of his achievements.

“Missteps”? While the examples given by Turner might indeed be categorized as missteps, allow me to present some of Falwell’s more egregious “missteps”, ones for which he more likely to be remembered, and quite deservedly so:

Kayla Walks

I meant to point this out, but it was during the hiatus so I forgot.  I’m blaming age and the pain meds as my cop-out.

Each year without fail, my wife and daughter participate in the local Relay For Life.  It’s a 24 hour walk-a-thon to raise money for the American Cancer Society.

The Jacksonville Daily News spoke to Kayla for their feature article on the Relay this year.

Kayla was devastated when her grandmother was diagnosed with cancer in 2003. Kayla, a White Oak High School sophomore who was in middle school at the time, remembers trying to stay strong. She couldn’t see her grandma often because of the distance. Kayla lived in Pennsylvania, her grandmother lived in Kentucky. And soon after the diagnosis, Kayla and her family moved to Jacksonville.

You can read the rest of it here.

I’m very proud of my daughter for taking time out of her very busy teenage life to participate each year.  I’m glad she’s trying to be part of the solution.

New Blogs

I just bumped into some blogs from the local paper, the Jacksonville Daily News.

I’ve added them to the blogroll because they’re blogs I’ll read (duh), and thought you might find interesting.  Most of you guys aren’t even remotely local, but give ’em a visit anyway.

• Local Blogs

  Lesson Plan Joe Miller’s Onslow County Education Blog

  It’s A Toler Thing Timmi Toler’s Column

  At The Edge Of Light John Althouse’s Photography Blog

  From The Sidelines Chris Miller’s Local Sports Blog

The Secret Evil Master Plan

I hate shaving my face.  I like shaving my wife’s legs, I like having my wife shave my face, I like how my face feels after it’s been shaved.  I just have an irrational hatred for actually shaving it.

But I’ve come up with a way to shave less, and so far it’s working out pretty well.  Since I keep a goatee, I have to shave around it and keep it trimmed.  What I do is…

40

Feels about like 39 so far. “Another day older and deeper in debt” to quotemine Tennessee Ernie Ford.

So I feel like the body is about 89, but I still think of myself as about 19. Is that a problem? I dunno.

Of course, I’ve only been 40 for a little more than two weeks, so maybe I have to wait for the full experience…

I certainly never expected to see my fortieth birthday.

“If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself. ” – Eubie Blake

Allow Me to Share

In response to this post at the Denialism Blog,

If I may, please allow me to share a warm fuzzy divorce story…

I met a lovely young lady just before Halloween in 1987. We got along famously, and we were married before Thanksgiving. Probably not the brightest idea I’ve ever had I admit, but I was twenty and twenty year old boys aren’t always very wise.

Nevertheless, we did OK, and had a little girl in ’91 and a little boy in ’94. By the time he was a few months old, we were constantly fighting, and all miserable.

We split in April of ’95, and agreed not to fight any more over the past for the kids’ sake. Anytime the conversation steered toward the sore spots, one of us managed to steer it away. It wasn’t always easy.

We turned out to be much better friends than we were husband and wife, and by the time our divorce hearing came up, we had settled everything ourselves and showed up at the courthouse sans attorneys and holding hands.

The magistrate saw our hesitation as we pondered the plaintiff’s and defendant’s tables and helped, “You can sit together, if you want.”

She asked us a bunch of questions about our marriage, and about why we wanted to get a divorce, and when we were done, just before she banged the gavel she said to us, “Y’know, I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and you’re the first two adults I’ve ever divorced.”

Anyways, long ’bout ’02 we decided we kinda liked each other and she (the ex-wife, not the magistrate…just to clarify) and the kids moved in with me. Now we’re approaching our second anniversary of our second marriage to each other, and I gotta tell ya’- divorce was the best thing we ever did for each other or for the kids, statistics be damned.

Anecdotal and scientifically irrelevant, but it worked for us.

Divorce rocks. Ask my kids.