RALEIGH, North Carolina -AP— [1]
Tammy Faye Messner, who as Tammy Faye Bakker helped her husband, Jim, build a multimillion- dollar evangelism empire and then watched it collapse in disgrace, has died. She was 65.
Elsewhere, stocks in mascara and lipstick companies plunged, inexplicably.
That bit of joking aside…. (Which I suspect she would giggle at, too)… I gather she appeared on Larry King the other night, and looked like microwaved death. Some reports I’ve seen have her as weighing in at 65 lbs. Sheesh. Anyway, she died Friday morning.
There are, of course, a goodly number of the usual bouts of grave dancing coming from the anti-religious left. I’m not going to bother dignifying those with a link. Yes, it’s true… There were a lot of things in her life that discredited her. Frankly, I was never a fan of the woman. But give her this, at least: she never lost her optimism , never went through the “why me” stage. Not in public, at least. And I wonder, in all candor, if her many critics will fare as well. Somehow, I tend to doubt it.