Jerry Falwell Quotes
The argument that making contraceptives available to young people would prevent teen pregnancies is ridiculous. That's like offering a cookbook as a cure to people who are trying to lose weight.
Falwell, Jerry. Quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, edited by Robert Andrews, Columbia UP, 1993, p. 88.
Kenyans were dying in droves from AIDS and the abstinence programs had not stemmed the spread of AIDS.
At the time, condoms and other forms of contraceptives were illegal to buy, sell, possess or own. As late as 1963 a Connecticut druggist was sentenced to jail for filling a doctor’s prescription for condoms and selling them to a married couple even thought the woman might die if she again became pregnant. The Supreme Court (Griswald v. Connecticut) established that a woman had a right to control her own reproductive cycle and the government had no business interfering with a privacy right possessed by a couple. Roe v. Wade established the right to an abortion. The same moral compunctions used with abortion were, and still are used by some to oppose any form of artificial birth control. They argued: preventing a life was as serious a moral failure as taking one. Many Catholics, many evangelical and fundamentalist protestants, and some orthodox Muslims are today morally opposed to birth control and believe that the government should ban birth control as it once was in the United States.
The Job Corps was planning allowing poor girls to enter as well the program which had been so successful for the boys. The immediate issue of the supply of birth control devices faced the program. Shriver, then the Poverty Czar with the concurrence of President Lyndon Johnson authorized the use of Federal moneys to pay for birth control devices for the female Job Corps members. This appears to be the first time that the Federal Government officially used public funds for birth control. Even with the voluntary ability of the girls to obtain birth control, pregnancy was still one of the major reasons for dropping out of the program.
Jerry Lamon Falwell Sr. was an American Southern Baptist pastor, televangelist, and conservative activist. He was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, a megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia. He founded Lynchburg Christian Academy (now Liberty Christian Academy) in 1967, founded Liberty University in 1971, and co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979.
