It's a cultural courtesy blown well out of proportion. Take a flip-side: when I was fourteen or so, I attended a memorial service for a friend, a girl from our school whose body had been dragged out of a local park requiring forensic identification. Now, let's get a few facts out in the open: she hated her family, fought with them regularly, smoked, drank, fucked, used pot, meth, glue, whatever she could get her hands on. She stole cars, ran with grown men to either steal cars or deliver drugs ....
At her funeral, the Christian preacher cast her as an angel, one nearly without sin (for none can be without the sin we are born into), who worked hard for her community and school, and was a pillar of her family's stability. It was all lies.
There would be absolutely no reason to stand up at her funeral and call her a skank, a meth-whore, &c. And there's pretty much no reason to now. But what I don't get is how the mere truth of the things she did and said is considered disrespectful.
Calling a stubborn man stubborn is not speaking ill of the dead. Calling a pious, stubborn man a crotchety old bastard is.
It's hard to not speak ill of someone like Falwell, but I'm satisfied to have shared a grin and a bong with a friend over the dead Rev's name.
To the other, though, Larry Flynt is officially exempted: if he'd wheeled up to the Rev's hospital room to cuss the holy-roller to the last breath, I couldn't say Falwell didn't deserve it.
If you must stab after Falwell, toast the people who survived his lust for hatred.