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 ...
Your tax dollars at work.
Cartoonist Gary Trudeau. Now there's a lefty troll among trolls:
official propagandist for the Democratic party.
too bad (sarc)
He's dead and hence not worth a curse. I shall do my best simply to forget that William Sloane Coffin ever existed.
RIP. He was an arrogant and misguided man who did much evil--but then, so for a time did Saul of Tarsis. Perhaps Coffin came to the cross on his death bed. I sincerely hope so.
Actually, just "the Left." Whatever he was, he was not a Christian.
...musta been the secondhand smoke.
It's almost prophetic that his last name was "Coffin."
Best of the Web today( http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008229 ) also has an interesting story about Coffin:
"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.." reports the Washington Post. A July 1999 Post article details what might have been the most consequential moment of Coffin's career:
When George W. Bush arrived in New Haven in the fall of 1964, his father was in the closing days of his first political race. Running against Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat, he was the beneficiary of the largest Republican turnout in Texas history that November, but it was not enough. Riding the coattails of his fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Yarborough defeated his Republican challenger by 300,000 votes.
Not long afterward, Bush decided to look up someone has father had told him he should go see, one of his contemporaries, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain later famous for his anti-war activities.
The greeting he received was hardly what he expected. "I knew your father," Bush remembers Coffin saying, "and your father lost to a better man."
Coffin says he has no recollection of his conversation with Bush and says if it happened, he was making a joke. But for Bush it was a jarring signal that Yale was going to be different, a place where he might not effortlessly fit in, where his father's values were not universally admired.
"You talk about a shattering blow," said Barbara Bush in a recent interview. "Not only to George, but shattering to us. And it was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college, particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I'm not sure that George W. ever put his foot again [in the school chapel]."
It reminded us of something Justice Sam Alito said during his confirmation hearing a season ago about his experience at Princeton University:
I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community.
For that matter, it reminds us of our own experience with smug campus liberals, at a third-tier Western university in the late 1980s. One wonders if it ever dawns on these people what effective recruiters they are for the political right.
Doonesbury has been around a while. Three of the people he based characters on are now dead.
--Hunter Thompson (Duke)
--Millicent Fenwick (Laci Davenport)
And now, William Sloane Coffin. Well, Brian Dowling ("B.D.") and Charles Pillsbury (Mike Doonesbury) are very much alive.
Have you ever read the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant (Matt 18:21-35)?
Bishop John Spong of the Episcopal Church is another one of these types from the Christian Left.
Michael Medved has had Spong on his show a couple of times. At least one time for sure.
So long to another relic of the sick 60's.
Well, let me post just one alternate perspective:
I met Rev. Coffin in the fall of '65, as an entering freshman at Yale, at the Freshman Religious Conference, held off-campus at a retreat in the woods.
He seemed to be a decent man, and he seemed to be trying to inspire us to do good things as Christians; he certainly wasn't trying to radicalize us or undermine anyone's faith.
I was disappointed with his later activities against the war, but I believe he probably did them out of sincere conviction, not as the likes of the current Dimocrats do, merely as a cynical means to subvert the GOP.
May he rest in peace; I'll say a prayer for the repose of his soul, while the so-called "good" people here wish him otherwise.
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