Posted on 04/13/2006 11:15:13 AM PDT by blitzgig
William Sloane Coffin Jr., 81, a Presbyterian clergyman and former Yale University chaplain whose early activism against the Vietnam War brought him international notoriety during a lifelong career of civil disobedience, died April 12 at his home in Strafford, Vt. He had congestive heart failure.
From the moment in 1958 when Mr. Coffin roared onto Yale's campus atop his motorcycle, he signaled that his presence would mean a distinctly radical approach to the social, political and moral upheaval that defined the next decade.
Mr. Coffin called himself a "Christian revolutionary" and believed that his outspoken activism sprang from the principles of his faith.
His 18-year tenure at Yale encompassed the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War, each of which he confronted in bold and daring fashion.
He was arrested in Alabama in 1961 while participating in the interracial Freedom Riders movement that challenged segregationist laws. He was later arrested in Baltimore and St. Augustine, Fla.
While his protests against racial segregation made news, his activities as a vocal and compelling critic of the war in Vietnam made him a celebrity. As early as 1965, he was convinced that the U.S. military presence in Vietnam was illegal and immoral.
"It's true that we're fighting Communists," he said at the time. "But it is more profound to say that we have been intervening in another country's civil war. The war is being waged with unbelievable cruelty and in a fashion so out of character with American instincts of decency that it is seriously undermining them."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Evidently he had no concern for what happened to the citizens of Viet Nam after we cut and ran.
There is some sort of limerick floating around in there, I am sure.
"Often" is a good rhyme for that. How about:
A Reverend William Sloane Coffin
Caused his country's defenses to soften.
He did it so well
That they sent him to hell
And the pitchforks go into him often.
Today is a good day.
A Dead Liberal is alway a good thing for this country and before anyone mourns this elitist, naive, liberal snob let us remember he and his type have seriously hurt our country with their feel good religious nonsense. Rev. Coffin, I hope you DO NOT rest in peace, I hope you burn in Hell for the damage you have wrought to the USA.
No forgiveness for Liberals.
It wasn't the cough, that carried him off. It was the coffin they carried him off in.
This worthless sack of s*** was invited to Iran to visit the hostages back in the Carter horrors. He went.
Back in the 1980's when an American soldier of WWII died the soldier wished to be buried with the Red Army communists. Sloan C. went and preached(?) the service.
W. Sloan C. will not be missed.
Like his fellow pro-Hanoi friends David Dellinger and Cora Weiss, Coffin was a smug, morally superior enabler of the Communist genocide in Southeast Asia.
Ping
William Sloane Coffin was a Skull and Bones member, I believe.
Look at this list of Bonesmen
http://www.wealth4freedom.com/truth/3/skullroster.htm
You can also see a Charles Sheldon Whitehouse, almost certainly related to Sheldon Whitehouse, the Attorney General of Rhode Island. Also, several Bushes and a Kerry.
Do you suppose he took pride in his accomplishments and hung a picture like this on his Living Room wall?
Yes, I believe Cora Weiss worked out of Manhattan's Riverside "Church" i the 1980s (where I believe Sloane Coffin was at one time "minister"; maybe they'll display Coffin's coffin) organizing the massive pro-Soviet nuclear disarmament demonstrations when Reagan was president (Thank God the good man ignored her). This was after Cora Weiss organized the "welcome" for her friends in North Vietnam for their admission to the UN, which followed her harassment of Vietnam POW families. You are known by your "friends", Mr. Coffin.
Good riddance, traitor. Rot in hell.
I suffered this clown's anti-Christian, socialist sanctimony when I was an undergraduate at Yale. He was then, in my humble opinion, a secular humanist, that is, an atheist. May God have mercy on his soul!
Excellent perspective, succinct, and sufficiently pithy.
Good job, GI.
One night, after a couple of hops, Dowd sank back into an easy chair in the wardroom of the Coral Sea and picked up a copy of some newspaper that was lying around. There on the first page was William Sloane Coffin, the Yale University chaplain, leading a student antiwar protest. Not only that, there was Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, standing by, offering tacit support . . . or at least not demurring in any way. It gave Dowd a very strange feeling. Out in the Gulf of Tonkin, on a carrier, one was not engulfed in news from stateside. A report like this came like a remote slice of somethingbut a slice of something how big? Coffin, who had been at Yale when Dowd was thereCoffin was one thing. There was Kingman Brewster, with his square-cut facebut looked at another way, it was a strong face gone flaccid, plump as a piece of chicken Kiev. Six years before, when Dowd was a senior at Yale and had his picture taken on the Yale Fence as captain of the basketball team . . . any such Yale scene as was now in this newspaper would have been impossible to contemplate. Tom Wolfe, The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie.
Everybody's passing makes people happy. Some are happy that the person lived, others happy that the person died.
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