In a May 16 column titled “Jerry Falwell -- Say Hello to Ronald Reagan!,” right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, who proclaimed, “Let me be the first to say: I ALWAYS agreed with the Rev. Falwell," admitted that she disagreed with Falwell on “one small item”: He should have assigned blame for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to "[Sen.] Teddy Kennedy [D-MA] and 'the Reverend' Barry Lynn," in addition to “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians -- who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle.” Lynn is the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Coulter wrote:
Actually, there was one small item I think Falwell got wrong regarding his statement after 9/11 that “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians -- who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle -- the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' ”
First of all, I disagreed with that statement because Falwell neglected to specifically include Teddy Kennedy and “the Reverend” Barry Lynn.
Second, Falwell later stressed that he blamed the terrorists most of all, but I think that clarification was unnecessary. The necessary clarification was to note that God was at least protecting America enough not to allow the terrorists to strike when a Democrat was in the White House.
Coulter went on to compare Falwell to Jesus Christ (“If you still think it isn't Christ whom liberals hate, remember: They hate Falwell even more than they hate me.”) and assert that Falwell did not blame all “the gays” for “ejecting God from public life,” but rather “gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle.” She added:
There have always been gay people -- even in the prelapsarian '50s that Jerry Falwell and I would like to return to, when God protected America from everything but ourselves.
What Falwell was referring to are the gay activists -- the ones who spit the Eucharist on the floor at St. Patrick's Cathedral, blamed Reagan for AIDS, and keep trying to teach small schoolchildren about "fisting."
Also the ones who promote the gay lifestyle in a children's cartoon.
As Media Matters for America noted, Coulter's syndicated column was dropped by several newspapers in March 2007 following her March 2 remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in which she referred to Democratic presidential candidate and former Sen. John Edwards (NC) as a “faggot.”