They couldn’t have been any further apart on the political and social issues of the day, but for decades, they had a word for each other: friend.
That’s just one of the many lessons Ted Kennedy and Jerry Falwell Sr. can teach us today.
Falwell died back in May 2007; a brain tumor felled Kennedy last Tuesday at the age of 77. In death, as in life, both men proved controversial and polarizing. There was no middle ground; either you loved Kennedy and hated Falwell or loved Falwell and hated Kennedy.
Kennedy’s liberal base and Falwell’s conservative backers missed something truly important about each of their heroes, and it is something critically missing in today’s venomous political atmosphere.
That was the fact that each was a human being, not a stereotype; a multi-dimensional person, not a single dimensional caricature.
The left loved to hold Falwell up as the quintessential, backward, knuckle-dragging conservative Christian. It was a stereotype trotted out each time the left needed a conservative to bash on TV.
Conservatives weren’t any better, portraying Kennedy as a baby-killing, womanizing drunk who rode through life on his illustrious family’s reputation.
Certainly, each man said and did things over the course of their lives they came to regret. Falwell’s blaming the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 on “gays, abortionists and secularists” certainly ranks right up there, as does his labeling Lynchburg’s former planning director a “communist.” So to does Kennedy’s outrageous 1987 attack on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, a vicious assault that began the politics of personal destruction. And then there’s Chappaquiddick.
Kennedy and Falwell never backed down from their core beliefs and were ferocious partisans in the public arena. But they also saw their opponents as human beings.
That’s something many of today’s political partisans are missing. To these folks, politics is a blood sport, a fight to be waged by any means necessary and won at any cost. Never give an inch; never work with those you may disagree with for the common good; always hold out for total victory, when a smaller victory would help many.
Such a mindset is common today among many people at the political extremes of our society. They make think they’re in the right, but they’re not.
Ted Kennedy and Jerry Falwell Sr. would beg to differ.
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