God Strikes Down Pat Robertson For What He Said About Gays, Hurricanes, 9/11, Haiti, Orphans …

I didn’t realize until I started writing this Wonkette Remembrance that Pat Robertson and I share the same unused first name that John Wayne also didn’t use, although I knew about John Wayne of course. Born Marion Gordon Robertson in 1930, the one-time GOP presidential candidate, televangelist, and culture wars hatemonger died today at the age of 93. Maybe he went straight to Heaven, which is a depressing thought, or to hell for all the people he focused rightwing hate on. Or maybe his brain shut down and that was that, which strikes us as most likely, if narratively unsatisfying. So it goes.

As Moms Mabley said of her ex-husband, “I was always taught never to say anything about the dead unless it’s good. He’s dead. Good.” (Nope, not Bette Davis speaking of Joan Crawford. Everything you think you know is a lie.)

You can go elsewhere for the sober discussions of Robertson’s business and media acumen, because we think his real genius was for saying inflammatory stuff that blamed all of the world’s ills on women, gay people, abortion, and liberals in general, linking religious fervor with politics and generally enshittening America. He had a knack for making political disagreements not mere matters of policy, but of framing them as a literal spiritual battle, with Democrats inevitably on the side of Satan. He wasn’t the first to do that, but it really was his bread and butter.

He infamously declared in a 1992 fundraising letter prior to an Iowa vote on the Equal Rights Amendment that

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

And while those are all noble goals, that’s really not what the ERA was about, because it was actually about unisex restrooms. Everyone knows that.

Robertson also had a habit of blaming disasters on whatever sinners he was thinking of at any given moment; in 2001, he explained that the 9/11 attacks were God’s retribution for

the federal courts, pornography, abortion rights and church-state separation. Talking again about 9-11 on his TV show a year later, Robertson described Islam as a violent religion that wants to “dominate” and “destroy,” prompting President George W. Bush to distance himself and say Islam is a peaceful and respectful religion.

Robertson really had it in for gay people and abortion, neither of which Jesus ever said anything about, and suggested that Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was God’s punishment for legal abortion in the USA, which is a good thing to know because I’d always thought he’d blamed gay people for that one, too. (Turns out that was John Hagee, a different nutter.)

But Robertson did warn in 1998 that Orlando, Florida, was likely to be hit by hurricanes if the city flew rainbow flags in celebration of Disney’s Gay Days promotion. And lo, hurricanes have indeed visited Orlando, but other parts of Florida too! Just to be on the safe side, Robertson also expanded that prophesy to cover the entire US and a wide range of catastrophes:

I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you. … [A] condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs, it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor.

Robertson also blamed the 2010 earthquake in Haiti on that nation’s “pact with the devil,” which is also what allowed Haiti’s 1791 revolt against French enslavers to succeed, because without the assistance of demons, the Black rebels couldn’t possibly have beaten white European colonialists. And indeed, Haiti has since then been beset by all sorts of tragedies and poverty, all of them the result of demonic forces, not geopolitical revenge by France and other “civilized” countries.

Oh hey, speaking of prophetic, back in 2014 Yr Wonkette predicted that someday, “Pat Robertson will shuffle off this mortal coil, and then we will have approximately 30% less things to blog about,” although at the time we didn’t foresee that Donald Trump’s “presidency” and the resulting aftershocks would more than make up for it. (At the time, Robertson was mad that gay people couldn’t be stoned to death, but instead were able to get wedding cakes.)

So much of Robertson’s deranged fantasies involved gay people, only they weren’t the fun kind of fantasies. Like that time he said that gay men in San Francisco and elsewhere deliberately spread AIDS to straight people:

“[If] they got the stuff they’ll have a ring, you shake hands, and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger. […] Really. It’s that kind of vicious stuff, which would be the equivalent of murder.”

Some of his hatemongering was of the more down-to-earth, practical sort, the kind that could really destroy some families, like his advice for how to shun your gay kids at Thanksgiving so they’d stop being gay. If that isn’t an example of Christ’s love, we … oh, it isn’t, not in any conceivable sense.

Once in a rare while, Robertson would surprise us by saying non-insane things, like when he said in 2013 that transgender people are OK because sometimes “there are men who are in a woman’s body” or women in men’s bodies, and “I don’t think there’s any sin associated with that.” Or in 2015 when he acknowledged that police not only can make mistakes, but can be genuine murderers, as in the case of Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd.

But then he’d go and say some casually evil shit, like telling a woman to comfort a grieving coworker whose three-year-old died by telling her that maybe the kid would have grown up to be Hitler, so God took the baby to heaven to prevent that, and the potential Hitler baby is in heaven anyway now, so cheer up. He didn’t explain why God neglected to kill the actual Baby Hitler, but hey, mysterious ways.

There was also his bizarre advice about how parents shouldn’t adopt orphans, because who even knows what kind of sticky psychological goo they might have on them.

“You just never know what’s been done to a child before you get that child; what kind of sexual abuse there has been, what kind of cruelty, what kind of food deprivation, etc., etc, etc. So, you’re not a dog because you don’t want to take on that responsibility. You don’t have to take on somebody else’s problems. I mean, you really don’t.

Robertson even backslid on his seeming acceptance of trans people by 2016, proclaiming that he hadn’t changed his mind about people who were really transgender, but insisting that was really rare, and so most people claiming to be trans are just faking it so they can go into restrooms to watch people poop, a thing that literally does not happen.

In conclusion, Pat Robertson is dead, good, and we will probably get by just fine without his help in averting hurricanes, since his record there is kind of spotty.

[AP / NYT / NBC News]