Pat Robertson

Pat Robertson, one of the central figures in making right wing evangelical Christianity the key voting bloc of the contemporary Republican party, has died.

I assume Erik has something very special marinating in the sous vide of schadenfreude, but here’s a little appetizer:

During the week of September 11, 2001, Robertson interviewed Jerry Falwell, who expressed his own opinion that “the ACLU has to take a lot of blame for this” in addition to “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians [who have] helped [the terror attacks of September 11th] happen.” Robertson replied, “I totally concur”.Both evangelists were seriously criticized by President George W. Bush for their comments, for which Falwell later issued an apology.

Less than two weeks after Hurricane Katrina killed 1,836 people, Robertson implied on the September 12, 2005 broadcast of The 700 Club that the storm was God’s punishment in response to America’s abortion policy. He suggested that the September 11 attacks and the disaster in New Orleans “could … be connected in some way”.

On November 9, 2009, Robertson said that Islam is “a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and world domination”. He went on to elaborate that “you’re dealing with not a religion, you’re dealing with a political system, and I think we should treat it as such, and treat its adherents as such as we would members of the communist party, members of some fascist group”.^[

Robertson’s response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake also drew international condemnation.Robertson claimed that Haiti‘s founders had sworn a “pact to the Devil” in order to liberate themselves from the French slave owners and indirectly attributed the earthquake to the consequences of the Haitian people being “cursed” for doing so CBN later issued a statement saying that Robertson’s comments “were based on the widely-discussed 1791 slave rebellion led by Dutty Boukman at Bois Caïman, where the slaves allegedly made a famous pact with the devil in exchange for victory over the French”.^[Various figures in mainline and evangelical^[89] Christianity have on occasion disavowed some of Robertson’s remarks.^[

In March 2015, Robertson compared Buddhism to a disease on The 700 Club.^[The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a conservative Christian watchdog group Robertson founded to promote Christian prayer in public schools, called for a multi-pronged attack on mindfulness programs because “they appear to be similar to Buddhist religious practices. Proponents of secular mindfulness say mindfulness is not a Buddhist practice; it is a contemplative practice used in religious traditions around the world by many different names.”^[

On an extremely trivial note, Robertson always claimed to have graduated near the top of his class at Yale Law School; he also failed the New York bar in his only attempt to become a licensed attorney, which is an extremely unusual combination of achievements. (Very few YLS grads ever fail a bar, and bar passage rates within law schools are very closely correlated with law school grades, so . . .)