Defense of Tinky-Winky
I woke up this morning with a definite sense of dread. How’d you like to sit down at your keyboard and try to defend somebody named Tinky Winky? That’s my mission today, folks. Wish me luck .
Tinky Winky is that Teletubbies character who got “outed” by the Rev. Jerry Falwell in February of 1999.
Falwell published an article in his National Liberty Journal that clued us in on the serious possibility that a character of a children’s television program, Tinky Winky, may have been a homosexual.
Falwell offered as proof the little guy’s purple color (“the gay pride color”), his triangular shaped antenna (“the gay pride symbol”), and his red “handbag.”
I still think Falwell missed the point on the red handbag thing. Tinky Winky may have been a cross-dresser. And cross-dressing alone doesn’t make you gay. Heck! Milton Berle made a career of it. And nobody ever called him gay. Unless Falwell did it under his breath!
But back in 1999, Falwell got lots of praise for his outing of a character on a television show aimed at pre-schoolers who had no idea what the heck he was talking about.
But the producers of the Teletubbies denied they were trying to imply Tinky Winky’s sexual orientation. They called Falwell’s allegation “outlandish.”
Falwell stopped short of claiming Po (the red one) was an arsonist, Laa-Laa (the yellow one) was a traitor, and Dipsy (the green one) was one of those devil-worshipping environmentalists. He just backed off his campaign.
The entire episode was nearly forgotten until he died a few days ago, and Ann Coulter resurrected the controversy, only because she can’t resurrect Falwell.
She offers as his defense in the matter that he wasn’t the first person who “outed” Tinky Winky.
So that, according to Coulter, makes Falwell’s “outing” less an issue that the other “outers.” (I know this is getting silly, but I didn’t start this. Ann Coulter did.)
She invoked the name of a purple kid’s show character seven times, in order to pay homage to her fallen hero – Jerry Falwell.
If Falwell’s death conjures up a kid’s show character to Ann Coulter, that in itself is weird. But seven times?
Somebody should also tell her that the Teletubbies wasn’t a cartoon show. It was really populated by actors dressed in brightly colored outfits. (I’ve heard some of them were ax-murderers.)
But in the world of Ann Coulter and the late Reverend Falwell, it’s the outward appearance of a Teletubbies character that counts. Not what’s under his costume.
While Coulter mentions that Teletubbies character seven times this week, she uses her favorite word – hate – five times.
According to her, liberals hate sinners. I’m a liberal; I don’t hate sinners. In fact, I can’t think of a single living human being I do hate.
And I’m hard pressed to think of more than a handful of people I truly dislike, and that even includes Ann Coulter. So what on Earth is she talking about?
Are we to think that liberals hated Jerry Falwell just because Ann Coulter says we did?
Certainly Falwell didn’t endear himself to liberals, but that’s no reason to have hated him.
Rev. Falwell did have a nasty way with words. Some of them, over the years, got him in trouble.
He used to call the civil rights movement, the “civil wrongs movement.” In the 1960s he simply didn’t buy that equality stuff. He was even known to have questioned the motives and methods of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in those days.
He also came out against the desegregation of the nation’s schools by proclaiming, “When God has drawn a line of distinction we should not attempt to cross that line.”
I’m wondering why Ann Coulter would state that she, “Always agreed with the Rev. Falwell,” even if he attacked his fellow clergyman, Bishop Desmond Tutu, by calling him “a phony.” Tutu had only fought against apartheid and won a Nobel Peace Prize for it.
On July 4, 1976 (of all days) Falwell was quoted as saying, “The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.”
The more Falwell quotes I read, the more I realize that Coulter’s allegiance to him must have been natural. The devil is a liberal, and liberals are all “Godless” (the title of one of her bestsellers) in her world, too!
It’s no wonder conservatives have taken such an interest in all of our bedrooms over the years. Coulter seems obsessed with such things, and Falwell did, too.
“Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them,” Falwell proclaimed in May of 1997. How can you argue with that statement, unless you’re sane?
This is in no way designed as a frontal assault on the Rev. Falwell. I would rather let Ann Coulter exalt him, then show you his words, and then allow you to draw your own conclusions about Coulter and Falwell being in lockstep.
She argues that even the Rev. Billy Graham has been measured in his final words about Falwell the man. That he, like many others, tempered their comments about him with the preface, “We didn’t always agree.”
She makes the claim as if she is the lone, unconditional supporter of everything Falwell has ever said.
But she certainly wouldn’t feel that way if she, as had the Rev. Billy Graham, once been called, “the chief servant of Satan in America,” by Jerry Falwell.
Coulter may be thinking that Graham should have just agreed with Falwell’s assessment of him, for the good of the country.
Edward A. Owens of Uniontown is Webmaster of “Red Raider Nation: Where Champions Live.” You can e-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net