Paul Weyrich Dies; Founder Of Heritage Foundation

Conservative icon Paul M. Weyrich, who helped found the Heritage Foundation, died Thursday morning at the age of 66.

From the Heritage Foundation blog:

Paul M. Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and first president of The Heritage Foundation, died this morning around 1 a.m. He was 66 years old. Weyrich was a good friend to many of us at Heritage, a true leader and a man of unbending principle. He won Heritage's prestigious Clare Boothe Luce Award in 2005.

Weyrich will be deeply missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, including son Steve, who currently works at Heritage.

Stay tuned for more tributes throughout the day.

Grover Norquist adds on National Review's website:

Ideas alone do not have consequences. Ideas, even -- or especially -- powerful ideas are like seeds. If they land in fertile soil and are cultivated they can grow. On rock or sand or ignored or tended by incompetents they die.

The idea of individual liberty and a limited constitutional government has been around a long time. Liberty doesn't need new ideas to advance, but institutions to give muscle and skeletal structure to a political movement for liberty. That is how Paul Weyrich changed the world for the better.

Paul Weyrich created institutions and networks that incubated new and old powerful policies and strategies to advance liberty. The Heritage Foundation. ALEC. The Free Congress Foundation. The Kingston meeting. Many of the structures of the "religious right." He understood that only freedom could successfully promote traditional values. He brought leaders of various freedom impulses together. Most of the successes of the Conservative movement since the 1970s flowed from structures, organizations, and coalitions he started, created or nurtured.

Paul also lived a balanced life with work, family and his faith.

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We will miss his puns and wisdom and hard work.

From Wikipedia:

In 1973, with the financial backing of Coors, Weyrich and Ed Feulner founded the Heritage Foundation as a think tank to counterbalance prevailing sentiment on taxation and regulation, which they considered to be anti-business. While the organization was at first only minimally influential, it has grown into one of the world's largest and most respected public policy research institutes and has been hugely influential in advancing conservative policies.

The following year, again with support from Coors, Weyrich founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC), an organization that trained and mobilized conservative activists, recruited conservative candidates, and raised funds for conservative causes.

Under Weyrich, the CSFC proved highly innovative. It was among the first grassroots organizations to raise funds extensively through direct mail campaigns. It also was one of the first organizations to tap into evangelical Christian churches as places to recruit and cultivate activists and support for social conservative causes. Indeed, they proved such a wellspring that, in 1977, Weyrich co-founded Christian Voice with Robert Grant and two years later founded with Jerry Falwell the Moral Majority. Weyrich coined the phrase "Moral Majority."

Read more about Paul Weyrich, Paul Weyrich columns, Paul Weyrich work, Paul Weyrich death, Weyrich on why he endorsed Romney, Paul Weyrich on NewsMax, Paul Weyrich on SourceWatch, more on Paul Weyrich death from a Heritage Foundation VP, Paul Weyrich dies on Fox News, Weyrich death on Michelle Malkin.

Comments

[LesserFool2]

Boo hoo.

Weyrich had no original idea.

He was a reactionary.

His only idea - not a particularly novel one - was to oppose any and all progress. To challenge any change of the status quo to preserve existing institutions and practices.

From opposition to civil rights for African-Americans, women and gays, Weyrich represented the worst of human nature. That he created a "think-tank" to wrap intellectual respectability around his prejudices and bigotry is hardly commendable.

The under-privileged, under-represented people of America are just a little more free with his passing.

[KathyinCT]

"MORAL" majority?

Now that was an oxymoron for the record books.

[IndyReader]

Never trust anyone without eyebrows.

[fedupinfla]

While I don't wish for anyone's death, THIS is how change comes...Old ideas die out and are replaced by new ones...

Guess that GOP base just lost another member....what a cryin' shame....

[BertrandRussell]

My sentiments exactly. On the human level I have sympathy for the man's loved ones. On the socio-political level, The Moral Majority is neither moral or the majority, they represent a throwback to the Dark Ages and I look forward to their demise (the group, not the people).

[alnc]

Gooc bye to an hateful old man. One that help found the Conservative revolution and its intolerant and hateful networks that supported racism, sexism and gave us Reagan, Helms and Bushes!!!!

[rontun]

May he have a glorious reunion with his maker and his bedfellows. His legacy is one to be treasured by all who subscribe to his exalted view of himself and his compatriots. 66 is but one digit shy of revealing his true nature.

[McFlipFlop]

LOL! So true.

[anthropan]

Good riddance; may he be rivaled and held in ill-repute; he was an enemy of humanity.

[AmandaRuth]

He almost lived long enough to see his greatest work come to pass, the absolute destruction of the middle class.

[BPCentrisAmerican]

So this is the man who toppled the Republican party. Thank-you and rest in peace, I mean that.

[pbley68]

The majority of the posts over at Fox News were vicious in their contempt for the passing of Paul Weyrich.

I didn't expect that, this proves that the Conservatism he espoused for, has become very unpopular and discredited.

[michaelbisson]

Come on people, a little respect?

I don't agree with him or his foundation, but my condolences to his loved ones.

[zoog21]

Classy and well put. Wish there more like you.

[MajorKong]

I buried my father-in-law last week. A good, kind, soft-spoken, hard-working person who was 10 times the man Paul Weyrich ever was.

I'll shed no tears for Paul Weyrich. May God show him the mercy he never showed others.

[McFlipFlop]

You are right, and my thoughts go out to your father-in-law.

[BuzzingAlong]

Why? And don't you think that his loved ones are the same hateful excuse this guy was? Otherwise how could they live with him?

[timberdoodle]

Finally cause for celebration.

[zoog21]

Gee....now what would you have said if someone posted that after a noted liberal commentator died?? Seems to me you have absolutely no class and no decency at all.

[Choicelady]

Even Jeffrey Dahmer had people who loved him. Personal loss is sad, and yes we understand his family and friends are mourning. But there are some people who are just so cruel, selfish, and evil and who heap their nastiness on us all so that we are not required to be kind or hypocritical when they die. He did great wrong in his lifetime. There is no need to be sad he's gone.

[motoGpifupleez]

The founder of a group of bigots is dead. I will shed as many tears for him as I did for Jerry Falwell.

[Colmore]

Seems to me the "Moral Majority" in neither moral nor a majority!

[quindy]

good point

[EricHayes]

"The moral majority is neither" was a bumper sticker in 1972 when Nixon/Agnew were running for reelection.

[TKDMike]

GOOD RIDDANCE....

[BPCentrisAmerican]

good point...

[Topsailsman]

From Norquist above:
"He understood that only freedom could successfully promote traditional values."

Is this just another case of putting "freedom" and "values" into every sentence even though it means nothing?

Let's try this: "He understood that only traditional values could successfully promote freedom".

I guess all their words are interchangeable since the sentence means nothing in either case.

[useyourbrain]

From Norquist above:
"He understood that only freedom could successfully promote traditional values."

I guess that's why they need State enforced heterosexuality since "freedom" would mean "heterosexuality" would cease to exist by their accounting. I didn't know being straight could only be accomplished by law enforcement.

They believed in "enforced freedom". You're free to be like me, or else.

[KarlaElisa]

I think he knew how to put a good sounding sentence together and convince people that theology was the only 'value' applicable.