The Very Last Thing I Have to Say About Tammy Faye Bakker Messner:

Some people around here are acting as if they had been personally victimized by Tammy Faye. I don't get it. Why all the vitriol?

I have no insider knowledge, have never particularly followed the PTL story, but I have always figured that Jim was the hustler and Tammy Faye was a good-hearted simpleton in a gilded cage, ridden by the demons of denial, who was as much deceived as anyone else in the whole sorry affair. I think Jimmy was the psychopathic conman of the pair, and she was his biggest dupe. I believe that she was quite capable of seeing all that ill-gotten money flowing around them and accepting it as evidence of God's blessing upon them.

Intelligence and discernment were never among Tammy Faye's great gifts. Compassion apparently was. Intellectually she never rose above her smarmy first-grader fundamentalism, but she extended her love to all who would take it.

And even if, in those earlier years, she deliberately and knowingly participated in Jimmy's grand con schemes, then she left one final gift for her victims. She left them with an opportunity to practice forgiveness.

-30-

if she had any real role in ripping people off, she would have gone down in the same investigation that cheesed Jim.

in more ways than one. I blame Jim Baker more than I blame her. I'm not sure how much of a good hearted simpleton she was, but I don't believe she started out with any evil intentions.

Besides, to me, the way she reached out to AIDS victims when so many of the prominent televangelists seem to think AIDS is God's punishment for sexual immorality makes up for a lot.

Now, for the cruel and tasteless joke. Tammy Faye is dead. Cosmetic company stock prices began their free fall...

managed to transcend it and become more of a Christian than the likes of Falwell, Robertson and their followers who seem to have many involved in bilking money out of the faithful that wasn't even on Tammy-Faye and Jim's radar screen so long ago.

She was a person who redeemed herself because an inner light shone and grew stronger. It's sad to still see posts inviting trashings of her when DU'er Nance Greggs did such a beatiful eulogy to her...that encompassed all her flaws but her great strengths as she left this world.

Bakker. Some of us are a little touchy about that ... I'm just sayin'

Bake
With ONE K.

edited for typos -- can't type today!

The essence of the woman. Very nicely put.

She saw a man that loved her and she wanted to be a singer. Everything else came later and was (mostly) beyond her control. She sure did seem to be attracted to 'bad boys.' I forgave her years ago, she was a victim of fame, money, celebrity, whatever...

Cancer is an EVIL that even athiests like myself can accept. It's a horrible thing, may she rest in peace.

I did follow it, thanks to a co worker with a sister in Charlotte who sent him the stories. She really didn't have much of a clue about the financial end of that business. She was the heart and soul and flowers and weeping person whose job in the world was to be her hubby's helpmeet and love everybody in the world the way Jesus told her to.

Bakker might have been a psychopath and a conman feeding off money from poor people who should never have been asked for it, but he was totally screwed by his competitors in the biz, especially Falwell. The whole thing went down like the most vicious hostile corporate takeover that has ever existed.

Tammy Faye, for all her sentimental gullibility, was a good hearted soul to the end. She never did fall for the allure of righteous hatred, and this is why she grudgingly won admiration from the left.

I certainly bear her no ill will. Good people get to be wrong about things, especially religion, and she was a good person who never succumbed to hatred.

while spending my grandmother's social security?

and thousands or millions of others like her.

Let me affirm that you have a right to your anger. However, at this point, that anger can only harm you. It cannot do anything to Tammy Faye, or for your grandmother. I wish you peace.

Or was she just stupid enough to GIVE it to them? There is a difference, you know.