It's the Forbidden Fruit parable for the 21st Century. Jerry Falwell Jr. brought low by an unfaithful wife who could not resist the devil's apple, a hotel pool boy. It's positively Biblical.
A faithless wife, easily seduced, who then drew her husband, her Adam, into a rebellion against the Lord. Together they are to be cast out of the Garden of Eden or at least the campus of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. It all sounds so familiar.
Falwell need not deny it, any of it. He needs to admit everything for how else can he be redeemed? He has his temptress Eve, Becki, who set him against his Gawd but he can dump her now that all is revealed.
Isn't this America's fundamentalist morality play? Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Ted Haggard, countless mega-church preachers, they're even popping up in Top Ten lists. The Boston Globe sees it as a rerun of the scandalous 80s. In their excellent book, "The Spirit Level," epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett, found that sexual peccadillos of all sorts were far more common in Bible Belt red states than in any blue state. It seems they've got a knack for it. Maybe that's why these guys can rebound so easily.
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Meanwhile, our homegrown evangelical heroes are gaining ground:
"If the race was decided by popular vote alone, Leslyn Lewis would now be the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
In a stunning result Sunday night, Lewis captured more of the popular vote that winner Erin O’Toole and runner-up Peter MacKay did on the second ballot.
On the second ballot, Lewis had 60,316 votes, while O’Toole had 56,907 and MacKay had 54,165. That breaks down to 35.2 per cent for Lewis, 33.2 for O’Toole and 31.6 for MacKay."
This sparked an interesting twitter bit on the acts of self-abasement (sex, sex, sex) inside the private doors of the bible-thumper churches in western Canada.
I wouldn't read too much into the Tory leadership race, NPoV. It was a pretty mediocre showing.
Evangelicals and similar types are always convinced that nothing can possibly be fun if it isn't really sinful; the more sinful it is, the more fun it must be.
And of course if you're a boss evangelical preacher, well, you didn't amass all that money and power just to not have any fun.
That does seem the pattern, PLG. Nearest to God. The devoted flock. That must get boring from time to time.
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