On CNN's Situation Room, a very uncomfortable Moral Majority founder and Liberty University president Jerry Falwell denied to Paula Zahn that knew Ted Haggard, the now disgraced former head of the National Association of Evangelicals. As with so much else, Falwell has it utterly wrong.
The reality, as it turns out, is that Haggard and Falwell have been partners in a wide range of efforts where the wall between church and state once stood. As former Bush faith-based crusader David Kuo attests in his book "Tempting Faith," Falwell and Haggard were regular participants in the White House's weekly conference call with the leadership of the religious right. A November 7, 2003 email from Haggard detailed how e joined Falwell and other Christian conservative leaders at the White House for President Bush's signing of the Partial Birth Abortion Act. And both Haggard and Falwell are partners in Battle Cry, a coalition created "to provoke a young generation to passionately pursue Jesus Christ and to take His life-giving message to the ends of the earth."
Falwell's retreat from Haggard, the leader of an association representing 30,000,000 American evangelicals, should come as no surprise. The only open issue is when Jerry Falwell will blame Haggard's fall from grace, as he did 9/11, on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians."