Billy GRAHAM family feud over burials. A talking mechanical cow.

[UTUSN]

Heard last night on the formerly-Art-BELL Coast to Coast. Writer Patricia CORNWELL (a Jack-the-Ripper i.d.-er?) sounded sincerely shocked at Franklin's planned memorial library, which appears to be a fundraising deal with a "talking cow"---the whole thing supposedly to evoke the Billy's humble origins on a dairy farm. She said she thinks GRAHAM deserves something on the scale and gravitas of a Presidential Library and DISPUTES that Ruth is NOT (as Franklin's side alleges) mentally capable for decision-making.

The Google search associated links with the SCHIAVO case---which emphasizes what we can ALL get behind: SELF-choice in pre-need decisions.

*******QUOTE*******

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16177634/

A family at cross-purposes
Billy Graham's sons argue over a final resting place

.... But at this moment everyone's attention is on the visitor, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who is talking about a memorial "library" that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, headed by Franklin, is building in Charlotte. Cornwell toured the building site and saw the proposed burial plot. She was asked by Ned, who opposes Franklin's choice, to come and give his father her impression.

"I was horrified by what I saw," she tells Billy, in the presence of a reporter invited to be there.

The building, designed in part by consultants who used to work for the Walt Disney Co., is not a library, she says, but a large barn and silo -- a reminder of Billy Graham's early childhood on a dairy farm near Charlotte. Once it's completed in the spring, visitors will pass through a 40-foot-high glass entry cut in the shape of a cross and be greeted by a mechanical talking cow. They will follow a path of straw through rooms full of multimedia exhibits. At the end of the tour, they will be pointed toward a stone walk, also in the shape of a cross, that leads to a garden where the bodies of Billy and Ruth Graham could lie.

Throughout the tour, there will be several opportunities for people to put their names on a mailing list.

"The whole purpose of this evangelistic experience is fundraising," Cornwell says to Billy Graham. "I know who you are and you are not that place. It's a mockery. People are going to laugh. Please don't be buried there." ....



http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Billy_Graham_Burial.html

Graham family at odds over burial site

.... The $25 million, 40,000-square-foot Graham museum is designed to look like a dairy barn that might have existed on the farm where Billy Graham grew up outside Charlotte. It is scheduled to open in the spring. ....

http://www.topix.net/content/kri/3907571392138223878324666951184016676976

Graham Burial Disagreement: Feud escalates with siblings' statements

The Charlotte Observer

December 13, 2006

.... But Graham did say he was 'disappointed ... (that) my brother (Ned) and a novelist (Patricia Cornwell, a Graham family friend) expressed their negative opinions about the nearly completed' library in Charlotte. He defended decisions to build the library and focus it on Billy Graham's 'humble beginnings' in Charlotte, saying his father backed those decisions. ....

********UNQUOTE*******

[mike_c]

1. I can't wait for the theme park....

:rofl:

[fairfaxvadem]

2. There was an extensive article in the Wash Post this week.

Including photos of that horrible fake barn-library-house of wax, south-of-the-border crapiness. It is ghastly, and just as bad as Ms. Cornwall says she described to the Grahams.

I'm no Billy Graham fan, but his son Franklin is way out of line on this. Geez, anyone would deserve something more dignified than being buried in that white trash theme park. I wouldn't wish this on the elder Grahams for anything. No wonder his wife is flipping out.

[UTUSN]

4. Pics inside this link (dial-up warning) - INCLUDING THE COW!!!1

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/12/AR2006121201338.html

[fairfaxvadem]

5. Yup, that's it.

Isn't that awful? And for all of us who grew up knowing when the next Billy Graham revival was on tv (my folks would always tune in for about 10 minutes. I think they wanted to like the Rev. Graham, and did respect him, but their generation of Roman Catholics just couldn't quite get into the revival bit, at least, not in our household), this is NOT a proper reflection of who he is/was, at least his public persona. He was always a hell of a lot more dignified than that obscene barn. And it is obscene. Or is profane a better word?

Franklin ought to be horse-whipped.

[KoKo]

8. Why hasn't Billy Graham seen the site? How could he let one son build

it and never go see it? :eyes:

[Mind_your_head]

9. Ehm, second paragraph of the article.....

"Retired and almost blind at 88, the evangelist is sitting in his modest log house on an isolated mountaintop in western North Carolina and listening to a family friend...

[Target_For_Exterm]

3. A talking mechanical cow?

At a memorial?

:shrug:

Republican fundies. Who can figure 'em?

[htuttle]

6. Moooooo...."Uh, Clem".......

As long as nobody asks it about porridge birds, it should be fine.

[bmbmd]

7. This breaks my heart.

Reverend Graham deserves better.