The dual anniversary of Joe McCarthy’s “Red Scare” and Jerry Falwell’s “Purple Scare”…

Two notorious warnings about threats to the American way of life are linked to the date February 9th.

In both cases, the quotes generated national attention when they were reported in the press. But the results were considerably different.

On February 9, 1950, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy made an ominous announcement in a speech to the Ohio Country Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia.

In the speech (online here) McCarthy famously claimed:

“I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party, and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy in the State Department.”

This quote was essentially the public launch of what evolved into an anti-Communist panic and witch hunt that lasted for years.

It was soon dubbed “McCarthyism.”

That term was originally coined in a March 29, 1950 political cartoon by the great political cartoonist Herbert Block, who signed his cartoons as “HERBLOCK.”

Exactly forty-nine years after McCarthy launched the Cold War era “Red Scare,” national news was made by another controversial public figure who was trying to launch what might be called a “purple scare.”

The story was broken on February 9, 1999 in an Associated Press story written by journalist David Reed.

It reported that televangelist Rev. Jerry Falwell had announced that the children’s TV show Teletubbies was secretly trying to turn kids into homosexuals.

The comments by Falwell in the AP story generated a great deal of additional media attention.

However, they created far more eye-rolling, snickers and scorn than alarm. And, no official Telletubby witch hunt followed.

The AP article that broke the story said:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell is trying to out Tinky Winky, suggesting that the purple, purse-toting character on television’s popular “Teletubbies” children’s show is gay.

The February edition of the National Liberty Journal, edited and published by Falwell, contains an article warning parents that the rotund Teletubby with the triangular antenna may be a gay role model.

To support its claim, the publication says Tinky Winky has the voice of a boy but carries a purse.

       “He is purple – the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle – the gay-pride symbol.”

Falwell contends the “subtle depictions”' are intentional and issued a statement Tuesday that said, “As a Christian I feel that role modeling the gay lifestyle is damaging to the moral lives of children.”

Of course, the fact that these famous/infamous warnings by McCarthy and Falwell are both associated with the date February 9th is just a coincidence — OR IS IT!?! 

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Related reading and viewing…

“A wife is to submit graciously to…her husband.”

In 1998, the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention decided to update the provisions of the “Baptist Faith and Message,” a set of principles adopted in 1925 to provide guidance to the millions of members of Southern Baptist churches in the United States.

The text of the 1925 version primarily focused on fundamental aspects of the Southern Baptist faith, which are generally similar to other Christian Protestant faiths.

There was nothing in it about the roles of husbands and wives or the definition of marriage.

Back then, what was “normal” with respect to such things was taken for granted.

Seventy years later, in the late 1990s, things were different.

Women had increasingly become “liberated.”

Homosexuals were increasingly coming out of the closet.

There was even talk of (gasp!) gay marriage.

So, in June of 1998, at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, the church leaders decided it was time to add a new section to the Baptist Faith and Message that addressed these “issues.”

The new section, titled “THE FAMILY,” was unanimously adopted by Convention members on June 9, 1998.

The first part had some language that took a clear shot at the newfangled notion of gay marriage.

“Marriage,” it opined, “is the uniting of one man and one woman.”

Of course, it wasn’t any big surprise that Southern Baptists opposed gay marriage (and homosexuality in general). They had already staked out that turf.

But there was some other language in the new section that caught the attention of reporters and quickly generated nationwide news coverage, a firestorm of criticism and many political cartoons and jokes.

The most controversial sentence was in the third paragraph, which says:

“A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”

The doctrine is loosely based on a Biblical quote, Ephesians 5:22-33. Those verses, which don’t actually say wives should “graciously” be “servants” to their husbands, are given in the King James Version as follows:

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

For weeks, the Baptist Convention’s new rule about wives submitting graciously to their husbands was discussed, lambasted and lampooned by newspaper columnists, TV commentators, feminists and comedians.

Naturally, many women and social liberals attacked and mocked the idea that wives should graciously submit to their husbands, viewing it as incredibly outdated, wrongheaded and insulting to women.

And, of course, TV comics couldn’t resist commenting on the flap.

For example, Jay Leno quipped:

“The Southern Baptists issued a new ruling this week stating that a wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband. What if a husband wants to lead her and the family to Disneyland on Gay Day? What do you do then? What if your husband’s an idiot?”

Given Hillary Clinton’s imminent nomination as presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, it’s especially interesting to read one of the paragraphs in the Associated Press story about the flap over the submissive wives doctrine.

It notes that in 1998 the most visible member of the Southern Baptist Church was President Bill Clinton. The reporter who wrote the story, Kristen Moulton, was told by White House spokesman Mike McCurry that Bill Clinton “was aware of the convention's action and had joked about pointing it out to the first lady.”

The criticism and jokes had no effect on the policies of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The sentence about a wife submitting graciously to her husband remained and still exists in the current Baptist Faith and Message text.

At least, it still exists on paper and online.

I haven’t seen any studies on how strictly it’s adhered to in Southern Baptist households.

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Non-submissive related reading: books featuring quotations by women…

“I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.”

On August 3, 1966, the brilliant, boundary-stretching and, unfortunately, drug-addicted American comedian Lenny Bruce was found dead in the bathroom of his home in Hollywood, California.

A syringe and other drug paraphernalia were on the floor next to him. The cause of death was ruled to be an accidental overdose of morphine.

Bruce was just 40 years old.

It was the sad fulfillment of a famous quote about the peril and pleasure of drug addiction that is widely credited to Bruce:

       “I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.”

Many books of quotations simply cite the quote as “attributed.”

Those that give a specific source for the attribution cite the 1970 book Play Power: Exploring the International Underground by Richard Neville.

Neville is himself a legendary 1960s counterculture celebrity.

He initially gained notoriety in Australia as editor of the underground magazine OZ.

In Play Power, Neville used the Bruce quotation at the end of a point he made about the unintended consequences of public hysteria over marijuana.

“When one discovers that cannabis is harmless, exposing society’s lie, heroin by analogy may seem tempting,” Neville wrote. “Moral: Tell the truth about pot and there will be fewer junkies.”

Neville then inserted Bruce’s “kissing God” quote, without giving any source information other than Bruce’s name.

It’s possible that Neville heard Bruce say the line in a conversation.

He mentioned in an interview in DUKE magazine that he’d met Bruce briefly in 1962, when the comedian came to Australia for an ill-fated tour that was shut down after one performance for “obscenity.”

I emailed Neville and asked him if Bruce used the “kissing God” quote when they met.

He emailed back saying he didn’t remember hearing it from Bruce himself.

“I can’t recall the first time I heard it,” Neville told me, “though I do remember the saying being quoted in the London OZ office in the late Sixties.”

I’ve been unable to find the “kissing God” quote in anything written by Lenny Bruce.

Nor could I find any evidence that he said it in any of his stand-up comedy routines.

However, a version of the quip is mentioned in the 1974 biography Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!, written by Albert Harry Goldman and Lawrence Schiller.

According to an anecdote recorded in that book, Bruce once told his friend, writer Terry Southern:

“You start off with one or two pills, then it’s three or four and pretty soon to get that flash, you gotta have a whole handful. An’ shit! Who wants to shoot without the flash? You understand? It’s like kissing God!”

On August 3, 1966, Lenny Bruce “kissed God” for last time.

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Related reading, listening and viewing…