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

[Jackpine Radical]

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.

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