May 16, 2007 02:51 PM UTC

Televangelists' Hall of Shame

• 2 Comments
• by: riogrande

As Justice Brandeis so eloquently stated, “[Our founders] believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.” Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 375 (1927) (Brandeis, J., concurring)….

Through the harassment of hearings, investigations, reports, and subpoenas government will hold a club over speech and over the press. 345 U.S. 41, 57-58 (1953) (Douglas, J., concurring)

Justice Michael Bender, in Tattered Cover, Inc. v. City of Thornton, 44 P.3d 1044 (Colo. 2002).

In honor of the dearly departed Jerry Falwell, this is the story of my “former life” exposing corrupt televangelists, my battles against Falwell’s fascist faction, and how I got into hot water with the Colorado Bar for being naive enough to actually believe Justice Bender’s pompous platitudes.

“One Sacred Chicken To Go!”
We’ll start with the fun stuff.

I was one of those hopelessly idealistic idiots who attended law school later in life — not because I wanted to do well, but because I wanted to do good.  During that sojourn, I was exposed to the fetid sewers of Evilgelical Christianity, and an entire industry devoted to separating little old ladies from their Social Security checks.  And I found a way to fight back.

I started publishing exposes of fund-raising fraud by local radio shock-jock and evangelist Bob Larson, which eventually morphed into the Bob Larson Fan Club page (http://www.boblarson…).  As evangelists are by their very nature haughty, the best way to undermine their credibility was through satire.  While the site had a lot of meat, it was also a bit saucy, with scandals including a minister stealing condoms from a drugstore, and Larson himself entering into a “confidentiality agreement” with the new husband of a woman with which he had been alleged (obliquely corroborated by handwritten diary entries by Larson himself — never let your paramour know where you keep your diary) to have had an extramarital affair.  It’s not like he had access to anything else that would be confidential….

One of our (a cooperative effort) most popular pages was the Televangelists’ Hall of Shame (http://home.earthlin…), listing some of the more notorious scandals.  As it scrupulously avoided politics, and Falwell was never caught in a hot tub with half the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, he didn’t quite meet the criteria for induction — the standard was formidable.  But perhaps the funniest scandal was the nekkid pictures we obtained of Marv Albert-doppleganger W.V. Grant — sans the roadkill on his head (http://home.earthlin…).

Over time, the site became increasingly political, as I went after James Dobson and his ilk for their flagrant hypocrisy (http://home.earthlin…), and in particular, focusing on my fight to preserve religious liberty (http://home.earthlin…).  This activity made me more than a few enemies….