Lest you forget or in case you did not pay attention and were not aware in the first place and may now find some people’s happiness with the passing of Pat Robertson, but not the end of the damage he has caused and goes on, a little unsettling, let me remind you of these gems that caused extreme hardship for the Gay Community.
I spent years as an openly Gay high school English teacher in the Buckle of the Bible Belt and I experienced the results of his false teachings in the name of the Jesus he wanted people to believe he loved. I am not one of those people who gets an inking of information and then forms a complicated opinion but someone who actually reads and listens to the other side to get a good idea how they think about whatever they claim to have been thinking about, and that called for me to watch the 700 club on a daily basis as it usually came on a few times a day on the local cable provider so it was there during housework or as humming in the background as I sat at my drawing table, to know what I as a Gay person would be facing soon.
I know how his twisted thinking affected people because it affected me, my community, and my students.
In 1990, in spite of Hitler persecuting Gay people, sending many to concentration camps, the camps they were kept in to by the United States to help clean up after the liberation because they were sexual not political prisoners, Pat Robertson claimed on his 700 Club that many of Adolf Hitler supporters were Gay and that homosexuality “is a pathology” saying,
“It is a sickness, and it needs to be treated. … Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together.”
He has claimed,
“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.”
Although Disney World in Florida had never officially hosted Gay Days but did not object when the Gay Community would choose a day to show up at either Disney park for the one day where we could feel comfortable being ourselves and knowing we were not being judged by the other tourists, when the 1998 “Gay Day” was announced, Pat claimed Orlando was inviting hurricanes, earthquakes, and terrorism, with a possible meteor thrown in because the city allowed the display of rainbow flags.
There was a massive boycott of Disney promoted by the Daily Oklahoman, the “State’s Newspaper” that is owned by the Gaylord family whose vacation resort and convention centered located just across from the main entrance to DisneyWorld and so it is a very convenient place to stay so as to boycott staying at Disney resorts, but close enough to go to the attractions without the paper trail a hotel receipt would provide.
Clearly, judging by beer cans and Target protests, Orlando knew that, official or not, if hundreds of Gays were going to be coming to town and spending money, tax money especially, on room and board, the more “welcomed” they felt, the more they would spend.
Robertson, however, had a warning.
“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.”
Ironically, the next major hurricane veered North and, rather than hit Orlando, hit Virginia where his Headquarters are.
When it came to September Eleventh in 2001 he let it be known that,
“I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen,’”
To prevent another occurrence like the massacre of 49 innocent people at the Pulse nightclub in 2016 by a shooter who’d pledged allegiance to a radical form of Islam, he suggested, that since Muslims are killing Gays,
“The left is having a dilemma of major proportions, and I think for those of us who disagree with some of their policies, the best thing to do is to sit on the sidelines and let them kill themselves.”
He proclaimed that the Equality Act, a Gay rights bill that was pending in Congress, would bring about nuclear war.
“This is a devastating blow to religious freedom and to the sanctity of America. If you want to bring the judgment of God on this nation, you just keep this stuff up. … I think God will say, ‘I’ve had it with America, if you do this kind of stuff, I’m going to get rid of you as a nation,’”
And offering two examples of how God might do it, “atomic war” and an attack on the nation’s electric grid.
His attitude towards AIDS puts the blood of thousands on his hands.
One of his first statements on AIDS was,
“AIDS is God’s way of weeding his garden.”
In 2013, he claimed gay men were spreading AIDS by wearing rings that cut other people when they shook hands, claiming,
“Really, it’s vicious stuff, which would be the equivalent of murder.”
His proof of this was that,
“In my own experience, our organization sponsored a meeting years ago in San Francisco where trained security officers warned me about shaking hands because, in those days, certain AIDS-infected activists were deliberately trying to infect people like me by virtue of rings which would cut fingers and transfer blood. I regret that my remarks had been misunderstood, but this often happens because people do not listen to the context of remarks which are being said. In no [way] were my remarks meant as an indictment of the homosexual community or, for that fact, to those infected with this dreadful disease.”
Got to love the attempted dodge in the end there.
Rather than missionaries contracting the Ebola virus in Kenya when it became a problem, he was more concerned that,
“You might get AIDS in Kenya. The people have AIDS. You gotta be careful. I mean, the towels could have AIDS. There are things — there are diseases in Africa.”
Apparently forgetting that seven years earlier Massachusetts had recognized Marriage Equality with no subsequent problem, when New York State adopted a marriage equality law in 2011, he warned,
“I think we need to remember the term sodomy came from a town known as Sodom, and Sodom was destroyed by God Almighty, and the thing that they practiced was homosexual activity and even they tried to rape angels who came down there, so that’s the kind of people they were. There isn’t one single civilization that has survived that had openly embraced homosexuality. So you say, ‘What’s going to happen to America?’ Well, if history is any guide, the same thing’s going to happen to us. We’re on a slippery slope and it’s going to kick over in a hurry. We’re looking at financial problems of huge magnitude.”
This was in 2011 after his most recent Christian-ish president had already caused a huge financial problem with no help from the Gays.
His reaction to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling for national marriage equality, had him going right to the tropes and warning,
“Watch what happens, love affairs between men and animals are going to be absolutely permitted. Polygamy, without question, is going to be permitted. And it will be called a right.”
And, I am sure people can imagine what he believed and spread was a cause of Covid 19.
“We are not turning when we have done terrible things. We have broken the covenant that God made with the mankind. We have violated his covenant. We have taken the life of the innocent, slaughtered them by the tens of millions. Children made in the image of God. And we have abused the poor. I mean, we’ve allowed this terrible plague to spread throughout our society. And it’s a small wonder God would hold us guilty. But the answer is, you know, you confess your sins and forsake them. Then he heals the land. It’s not before. You are right.”
This “turning” had previously been defined as allowing Gay equality.
Apparently, really wanting one but not getting one as a result of Gay Day at Disney, Marriage Equality, and the increased acceptance that Gay people are part of the All Men who were endowed by their creator with unalienable rights, Robertson landed on a new cause of his longed for nuclear war, Transgender people.
In 2016, he voiced concern that,
“We are facing thermonuclear annihilation and what are we debating in America? What are we debating? Where a little kid goes to the potty. I mean, this is nuts, absolutely nuts. It is crazy. For the United States of America to put the power of the federal government and all of its money and resources behind this transgender movement, it is just nothing short of insanity.”
He blamed the growing acceptance of Transgender people on women serving in combat and no longer being “the weaker sex”, a reworking of his women becoming witches and Lesbians theme.
10 years before he died he had actually said,
“I think there are men who are in a woman’s body. It’s very rare, but it’s true. Or women that are in men’s bodies. And they want a sex change. And that is a very permanent thing, believe me, when you have certain body parts amputated, and you have shot up with various kinds of hormones, it’s a radical procedure. I don’t think there’s any sin associated with that — I don’t condemn somebody for doing that.”
But then he saw the opposite view was more financially lucrative.
On his program, when advising a parent who had caught her son looking at undefined homosexual content (it could have been porn, or it could have been life saving information), he first told her to cut off her 13-year-old son’s internet access which is a parental right and responsibility, but then he went on suggesting that this is proof that her son was being sexually abused making the standard connection between Gay and child abuse.
His Christian Coalition worked against education about safer sex during the opening years of the AIDS Pandemic using the 700 Club to oppose the use of condoms because the latex barrier robs the sexual act of intimacy.
In response to the election of Joe Biden in 2020, he prayed on the 700 Club,
“In the name of Jesus, I bind the spirit of delusion that has come across our land. We will not surrender our nation. We will not give up this great country. And Satan, you cannot have it, in the name of Jesus. I believe God has heard and I’m asking everybody in this audience to pray. It isn’t over yet. And I do not think, again, He wants to turn this nation over to socialism and Bernie Sanders and oh- AOC and those people are pure socialist and they want to take over control of everything. We cannot allow that. So let us pray. And what am I hearing? I still think Trump’s gonna ultimately win.”
Again, no response.
He had prophesied in October prior to the election that Trump would win because he was God’s chosen vessel, so he needed the save. It was Satan who put Biden in office.
“Without question, Trump is going to win the election.”
Apparently even in elections God gets Schtooped by Satan again.
The result of Biden winning would be, according to Pat, Muslim-majority nations attacking Israel, but, on the upside, God would jump in and wipe out those countries, leading to “a remarkable time of peace.”
His objection to the Black Lives Matter movement ignored its reason for being, insisting instead that it wants to “destroy the nuclear family” as well as Christianity because, I guess, nothing says nuclear family and Christianity like rogue cops killing unarmed Black people, even sleeping ones.
Oh, and Lesbians.
“They want to up-end the capitalist structure and destroy America. This is a stalking horse for a very, very radical anti-family, anti-God agenda. We don’t want to go along with a lesbian, anti-family, anti-capitalist Marxist revolution.”
This is a man who celebrated the death of Gay people.
He supported governments that wanted laws to allow Gays to be killed just for being Gay. He blamed Gay deaths from murder, deaths like those at the Pulse nightclub, on the victims. He promoted the death of Gay people during the opening years of the AIDS Pandemic for political and financial gain, promoting any laws that would bring about those deaths and got people on his side by claiming it was the will of God.
He weaponized Jesus against a segment of American Citizens because it brought him money.
Mammon, not manna.
This man relished in our dying.
He relished in the deaths of our families, blood and chosen, and friends.
He basically killed Johan Vessup.
I lived under the cloud of this man’s teachings. I was verbally and physically assaulted. I received death threats, two by phone message machine, one in a typed letter, neither followed through by local law enforcement. I watched friends disappear as they approached their last days only learning of their fate through the grapevine. I saw students facing physical and verbal abuse in schools and had to battle Robertson’s adherents to end it as best I could.
I have seen the damage done in Jesus’s name. I have heard his words misused against me and my kind.
My experience was real and visceral. It was not a theoretical something that others had to deal with.
So, even if after reading this you feel I should only speak respectfully of the dead, this is a man who spoke gleefully as people died and worse about them when they did, so I am going with my happiness that, although his damage might not be able to be pulled back, it will stop from the source with better results.
In the names of the thousands he helped kill, I am content with this death.
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