This is a good place to note the passing of one
Billy James Hargis, who was one of the very first right-wingers (remember when we called them John Birchers?) who established his own *ahem* "institutions of higher learning" and then went on to infamy as a sinning televangelist (bold emphasis mine):
Quote:He was not sorry because the Devil was to blame; the Devil, and communists. Both were out to get him. They were, of course, in cahoots. The entire left-wing movement, as he often said, was of the Devil. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mr Hargis's heyday, Satan and the Reds had their claws deep in America's government, its schools, the Federal Reserve, the National Council of Churches, the movie industry and the press -- especially Newsweek and the New York Times. Though the communists in the country might be numbered in the thousands, a violent takeover was imminent. [...]
No one could accuse Mr Hargis of downplaying the menace. At the height of his fame, he made daily broadcasts on 500 radio stations and 250 TV channels. (In 1950, he had been one of the first evangelists to preach on the small screen.) His Christian Crusade ministry also put out a weekly intelligence report on the progress of Soviet plots. He wrote books: "Communism: The Total Lie", "The Real Extremists -- The Far Left", "Why I fight for a Christian America", and his bestseller, "Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?" [...]
As televangelists do, he also set up courses and centres of learning: the National Anti-Communist Leadership School, the Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Youth University and, in Tulsa, the American Christian College. A naive reporter once asked him what was taught there. Why, Mr Hargis answered, "anti-comunism, anti-socialism, anti-welfare state, anti-Russia, anti-China, a literal interpretation of the Bible and states' rights." [...]
The targets of his daily wrath were not only homosexuals and women's libbers but the blatantly sexual pop-gods of the day: "When the Beatles thrust their hips forward while holding their guitars and shout, 'Oh Yeah!!', who cannot know what they really mean?"
Yet in 1974 both male and female students at the American Christian College, and three male members of the college choir, the All-American Kids, claimed Mr Hargis had deflowered them. One couple allegedly made the discovery, on their wedding night, that Mr Hargis had slept with them both. He strenuously denied wrongdoing, citing the biblical love of David for Jonathan, blaming "chromosomes and genes" (an unexpectedly scientific explanation) and threatening to blacklist his defamers. Later, when the scandal had caused the collapse of his college and his empire, he defended himself with a line that has since become a televangelical favorite: "I was guilty of sin, but not the sin I was accused of."
One of the necessities of conservatism, by definition, is its constancy. We think of the sinning Bennetts, the Bakkers and the Swaggerts, the Falwells and Robertsons and Limbaughs as individual hypocrites, and the conflation of religion and conservativism as a new contraption rigged by the current (largely amoral) Republican Party, but the rhetoric borrows almost entirely from that of the most frothing of the anti-Communists and moralists of fifty years ago.
Or, to be less eloquent: Same crap, different day.
