Running With The Devil

After Pat Robertson announced that the earthquake in Haiti was caused by a pact the Haitians made with the devil to win their independence from the French, I decided to do a little Google search on the reverend. I remembered a few of his totally bat shit statements but Jesus Christ! He’s one of the sleaziest, most evil dickheads hiding behind the cloak of Christianity that this country has ever produced. Here’s just a sampling of Robertson at his most offensive: blaming 9/11 on America’s tolerance of abortion and homosexuality, saying the Supreme Court was a greater threat to the U.S. than Al Qaeda, describing feminism as a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians and publicly calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Can you believe that three million people actually signed a petition supporting this dumbass for the Republican presidential nomination back in the late eighties?!? Even more disturbing are some of Robertson’s former business associates. In his diamond enterprise they included such fine upstanding people as Zaire's dictator, Mobuto Sese Seko and the good Baptist, Liberian war criminal Charles Taylor. He also agreed to an out of court settlement in a 2001 case where ten black female employees of his Christian Coalition sued him for discrimination. One of the allegations was that they had to use the back door and eat their lunches in a racially segregated area. Sounds like the Jim Crow south?

It’s not surprising since his father, who was a U.S. Congressman and Senator from 1933 to 1967, spent his career trying to keep these discriminatory laws on the books. It looks like Pat Robertson still yearns for the white, upper-class society that he knew as a child. If he was just your run of the mill crook using Christianity to fatten his bank account it wouldn’t be so scary but he actually thinks he’s the mouthpiece for God. The fact that his asinine predictions of the world’s end in 1982 or major terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2007 never came to pass doesn’t seem to put a dent in this man’s belief in his own infallibility. Hmmm, if I was betting my money on who actually made a pact with the devil who would I pick? The Haitians who fought to free themselves from the yoke of slavery or the Christian Right’s answer to Sylvia Browne?