He’s not lying. He really believes it I’m sure. I’m also sure he believes it out of ignorance.
**
True. They are based on lies. Lies he undoubtedly was taught, and heard, and read, and believes are true.
Not everyman overcomes his upbringing and culture, and no one over comes it all at once.
However, in spite of that, I don’t think he wished death upon you or any gay man. In this he seems to be one up on you.
**
I am and have been defending him. I am a filthy bigot and a liar?
Me? What have I done to you?
Let me ask you this question:
Have you ever made fun or said deprecating things about the religious right?
Have you said bad things about fundies in general?
Do you know people who have?
Do you call them on it when they do, or do you let it go by?
If we could go back in time, and make a list of bad things you said about the religious right, would it be longer than Pat’s against gays?
*I’m not saying you have, I’m just asking.
Because, I guess, if you have, how much better are you just because they started it?
That’s worse than anything he said about you.
You’ve completed dismissed the man, and everything about him, and everything he’s ever done on the basis of a few ugly comments.
I understand your anger, but that seems pretty harsh.
I’ve known and know lots of bigots. While bigotry is certainly bad it rarely represents the sum total, or even a small percentage of any person’s being.
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just ill-informed on this issue, Syclla. Everything Pat Robertson says is not quoted on the internet for easy citation. And much of his public media pronouncments are calculated to not be offensive to someone who is not listening for the code words. However, the Christian Coalition, which he founded and remains involved with regularly uses hateful lies against homosexuals in their fund raising letters. For instance, the following is excerpts from a letter they sent during the debate in Hawaii over allowing gay marriage.
They say so themselves. It is a war. But it is a war in which they are willing to demonize and lie. You can’t excuse it by saying he’s a man of his generation. Repeating a lie is still lying, even if you believe it to be true. That’s bullshit and you know it, for, once again, John Shelby Spong, is just as old and just as Christian.
The point is that Pat Robertson’s 700 Club is broadcast 3 hours a day on Fox Family, with a potential market of 70 million households. His lies foster the hatred that allow the violence that takes place against homosexual men and women throughout the United States. How much better would it be if he preached Love instead of saying we’re Pedophiles and Evil? What if he told his followers to Love us instead of saying that accepting us will lead to God destroying our nation?
He is dangerous, because he’s more subtle that Fred Phelps. He’s insidious because he reaches so many people.
He preaches Love the Sinner Hate the Sin, but his actions belie his words. His one-time ghost writer, Mel White, came out in the early 1990s. Pat Robertson has since refused to meet with Mel. Love indeed.
So, getting back to the vileness of Tom DeLay, the fact that the Christian Coalition and the even more extreme Focus on the Family, support him causes me great worry. The fact that the Republican Party makes men such as Delay and Trent Lott their Congressional Leaders sickens me. You keep bringing up Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. But you are attempting a distract. These lefty wackos aren’t the Majority Leaders in the party. In fact, they hold no position of power in the party. Big Difference.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Homebrew *
**I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just ill-informed on this issue, Syclla.
[quote]
**
Please don’t. I know a lot more about Pat Robertson than you do, as I’ve looked at both sides of the issue, where it seems that you’re simply repeating things you’ve read about him that are negative.
I’ve read those negative things too. I’ve also been to his website. I’ve also checked campaign contributions. I’ve even been to a Promisekeepers meeting.
You on the other hand have read propaganda.
**
Oh God. Code Words. Since he comes out and says gays are bad evil, whatever, why does he have the need for code words?
**
I get the feeling that you’re not hearing me. You keep telling me that is a bigot. I keep agreeing. You keep acting like I haven’t heard you.
**
It’s not a lie if you believe it to be true. It’s ignorance. I am not giving him an excuse. I am explaining the reason. There’s a difference.
Besides, I see a lot more hate rhetoric directed at Pat, then he is directing outwards. Try on google.
I see Pat credited with great evil and power and machiavellian machinations, but when I actually look at him and what he does, such a stance is ludicrous. It is manifestly untrue.
**
Yes. He sometimes says bad things about gays. Sometimes he’s not so bad on the subject. 99% of the time his message is milquetoast.
It’s like having grampa at dinner. Most of the time he bores the shit out of you, and once in a while he really lets go a humdinger against the negroes, and there’s an uncomfortable silence.
Yes. That makes Gramps a bigot. However it is not the sum total of who he is, and it sure as shit doesn’t make him publically enemy number one.
I’ll tell you one thing. You ask why pat doesn’t preach love and tolerance towards homosexuals, why he doesn’t have a positive message.
I don’t know.
I don’t know that he ever will.
But I do know that there is very little chance that it will ever change if all you do is hate him back, demonize him back tenfold. That would merely confirm his errant beliefs, wouldn’t it?
An honest look would seem to indicate that Pat is on balance a fairly decent fellow discounting some of his unfortunate prejudices. He does good things, and for the most part, his message is positive.
(You can take my word for this, or we can go and examine Pat’s website, and such. Please take my word.)
He has in the past changed. He is capable of that. His stances on different issues can’t be simply categorized and thrown away.
There is hope, but not if you hate him back, not if you turn him into an arch-villain.
I mean, Jesus Christ, the guy pretty much came out and said that abortions were ok in China! That’s a pretty transcendant step on that issue, don’t you think.
Do you think he got the stance because the Chinese people began a campaign of hate against him, or did it happen because he somehow became informed, because he somehow found some common ground.
Demonize him, and hate him and the door is closed, and you’re really no better unless the consolation that he started it is meaningful.
**
Why not? Did he say? What were the circumstances?
Not that this is particularly meaningful we already know Pat’s bigoted, just curious though.
Do me a favor if we’re going to continue. You don’t have to keep trying to convine me that Pat Roberts is bigoted. I know.
BZZZZZT! Wrong answer. Marraige is a civil union. It would be unconstitutional to give “the” church (which church?) the authority to sanction marriages. They could exclude atheists, etc.
I can’t speak fpr gays as to whether they might accepter a term other than “marriage”, but as I alluded to in my earlier post, shouldn’t we first discuss whether two men or two women can be in love–romantically–before tackling the M-word? Or should we come up with another word for that because “traditionally” only a man and a woman can be in love?
I’ve never watched the 700 Club Scylla, but I accept your description of it. I accept that for the most part his message is positive. However, my problem with Robertson concerns his faith healing. Here’s an interesting
I am very down on medical quacks. They take advantage of the most ignorant and least capable members of our society. The fact that Robertson himself is a graduate of Yale Law School makes it even worse.
Pat’s brand of faith healing is along the lines of
“I see a women in Detroit. She has not been feeling well. She has been suffering from severe headaches. I see the Lord taking care of those headaches. The pain is gone. Hallejuleah!!!”
Pretty hokey.
He does a bunch of these type things. He sees cataracts in Saskatchewa, tumors in Tucson, aphasia in Annapolis, and every now and then he gets lucky and little Betsy in Detroit calls up and says the headaches are gone.
James Randi wrote a good book about it, and other faith healers in general.
Well, I’d be interested in statistics from times and places where “common law marriages” were legally recognized. My impression is that they were approximately as likely to result in a lifetime union as the formalized, licensed marriage – in other words, where the two parties meant and acted out a commitment that transcended the initial infatuation and the occasional disagreement.
You can’t “create effective social institutions at will” – what you can do is to give legal recognition to effective social institutions that have evolved, or refuse to do so out of allegiance to a mythical construct about “how things were in the Good Old Days” or your personal religious beliefs.
As for the latter, I can play the Slippery Slope game along with you, and probably better. It’s obvious that if I vote for a Liberal Republican like Sherwood Boehlert or Rudy Giuliani, or even a moderate, I’m paving the way for a regime where the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s opinions on what is safe for Americans to read, view, or believe are enacted into law. Therefore I must never ever vote for any Republican, because one thing leads to another.
C’mon, December!! Nobody is asking you to endorse an “overnight marriage” where somebody takes a fourteen-year-old girl (or boy) to the justice of the peace for a 24-hour temporary license before carting her (or him) off to the motel.
Yeah, it’s not traditional marriage in the sense of what Ozzie and Harriet portrayed in 1952. Neither were arranged marriages among the medieval and 18th Century upper classes in England. Does that mean that everybody over there is illegitimate?
You’re being asked to recognize and honor one thing – the legal recognition of the union of two people of the same sex who have formed a romantic attachment and want to formalize that in a permanent commitment.
I personally would have no problem with legal recognition of contracts among the polyamorous that spelled out the rights and duties of every man, woman, boy, girl, and consenting adult sheep or sheepdog that chose to join said polygamous marriage. I would not count it a marriage in the sense I mean by the word, as I would the committed union of two gay men or woman, nor what my wife and I have shared for 27 1/2 years. But I’d be more than willing to respect the idea that that’s what they want to agree to, and it is truly none of my business.
Well, I won’t speak for Homebrew, but I expect him to act like a Christian minister is supposed to. Like the happily married couple who serve my church, and who welcome gay people and support gay commitment ceremonies (you cannot call them marriages in N.C. by law, nor can you hold a church service that calls them that, but “commitment ceremony” is quite valid.)
And the Senatorial election in Virginia in the early 1960s pitted Pat Robertson’s father A. Willis against Spong’s cousin William, in a case of rampant small-world irony. Spong was just prior to that time the Rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lynchburg, just down the road a piece from the Thomas Road Baptist Church.
Lilairen, I think I have you beat. My mother’s sister spent most of her adult life keeping house for her parents. Their nephew left his home (his father being an ultrastrict Holiness Church minister) at the age of about 20 and made his home with them, working and paying them rent until they died, and continued the same relationship with my aunt – their relationship being ostensibly a brotherly-sisterly affection. After he retired, just before he turned 70, he realized that he would be leaving her effectively destitute when he died, and so married her. He died eleven months and one day after their marriage, one day after she became legally eligible to receive widow’s benefits under his pension fund’s rules. I do not know what their sexual arrangements were before or during the marriage, and I don’t much care. But the commitment to love each other for a lifetime was there long before they had any overt thought of marriage.
Final point: According to Mel White, who collaborated with him on books while still in the closet, Pat Robertson is in favor of the Rushdoony-White program of “turning this country into a morally sound Christian commonwealth” by enacting his understanding of what is proper behavior for citizens. This is the principal reason why his private 700 Club-supported college is named Regent University, as a look at the website will show you.
I don’t oppose Pat Robertson with the vengeance I do simply because he’s against gays. A lot of people I do like are, sadly, misinformed about what gay people really are like and as such are the victims of their own ignorance and of prejudices inculcated from such ignorance. I’m opposed to him for two reasons: He regularly produces falsehoods about the religion to which I am strongly committed (Homebrew quoted several up above), and he’s out to destroy or subvert the Constitutional basis for freedom that makes me proud to be an American.
Perhaps the term “Nehemiah Scudder” may say something to you?
Elucidator: Whose church? As a sincere Christian myself, I refuse to allow these hatemongers to speak by default for Christianity.
If the rights and benefits of such an arrangement are legally equivalent to marriage, as in Vermont, then it’s the height of hypocrisy for anyone to refuse it the title. Two atheists in love mean towards each other what my wife and I do, but don’t recognize it as a commitment before the God that they do not believe in, as we do. Does that make a difference? Should I explain to Gaudere that as an atheist she has no right to marry?
As a veteran of a heterosexual marriage still going strong more than a quarter century after the wedding, I say that whatever walks like a duck and quacks like a duck deserves to be called a duck and have whatever rights and responsibilities ducks may have, regardless of what the duck may have under the feathers.
“The privilege of going to a courthouse for a marriage license” is not all that’s entailed – the legal recognition of a marriage makes sweeping changes in the rights and responsibilities of the two persons vis-a-vis each other and in their relationships with the third-party world. If Barb’s sister-in-law Diane should attempt to disinherit me at Barb’s death, she’d have a hard fight – I can prove we’ve been married and mutually supportive since before she was able to cross the street without a grownup. But unless, and sometimes even when, an extremely competent and thorough lawyer draws up paperwork covering every contingency that the law allows us married folk to assume is in place, a gay couple can find themselves in legal hot water whenever any significant life change happens to either.
Right at the moment, Raleigh is contemplating a law to prevent the renting of houses to large and presumedly rowdy groups of university students, by insisting that no more than two people not related by blood, marriage, or adoption reside in a single dwelling. If Barb and I owned a house and wanted to rent a room to a college student, we could. If Grace and Margie, a committed couple who are our friends, wanted to do likewise, they would not be able to under that law – there is no legally recognized relationship between them, so they constitute the “two people not related” despite their sincere and lifelong commitment, and cannot rent to a third party not related to either.
He doesn’t get the “ignorance” out. Ignorance is only applicable if he’s never been presented with the truth, and no one as active in American life, and on that issue, as he has been in the past ten years, could be ignorant of the other side, more commonly called the truth. He’s heard it, and rejects it because he is a cold, evil, bigotted fundamentalist, a cancer on the Christian religion and tumor on the American body politic.
No excuse.
Then he’ll always be a monster.
He has acted so as to keep me and everyone like me a second-class pseudo-citizen. That is more evil than killing me. It’s worse to hurt someone and leave them to suffer than to kill them and end their pain.
You defend the indefensible. No different than an apologete for the Ku Klux Klan.
You defend a man who has directly attacked my humanity, who has worked to make me a second-class citizen, who has effectively blamed me and people like me for 9/11, and have the audacity to claim that he’s not such a bad guy.
Nothing that wasn’t true.
Nothing that wasn’t true.
If I know what they’re saying is untrue, I call them on it.
The badness/goodness of comments is totally irrelevent, and totally subjective. Nothing thats true, no matter how harshly worded, could be said so angrily as to be a “bad” thing about a person like Pat Robertson, in my opinion. Yours differs. Why should I care about your measure of “bad” things to say? All I care about is the truth.
All that matters it the truth, and every word about gays that has spewed forth from that monster’s mouth is a vicious, evil lie.
Those “ugly comments,” as you call them are direct attacks on my very humanity. If I could get away with it, I’d knock him to the ground and pull the trigger myself.
I don’t care if a lying, anti-gay bigot cures cancer, AIDS and poverty. They’re still scum.
Oh yes, how dare I have the gall to be gay, and to be upset by that horrid, evil, putrid man’s actions directly against me and anyone like me, and react accordingly.
No. I think you should be upset. Wanting to kill the guy is extreme. Attacking me for suggesting that he’s probably not half the boogeyman you think he is is also extreme.
Wishing harm upon someone who has worked long and hard for the devaluation of my life and the lives of millions of those like me is extreme? No more extreme than wanting the death of other horrid, villainous evil-doers like bin Laden or Hussein. Robertson is just as evil as they are, just as much of a danger to decent folk.
And those who protect him deserve the same fate he does, because they have chosen to take the side of evil, and should be treated appropriately.
I can’t imagine how you could have possibly proven my point any better.
So, Pat is as bad as OBL.
He deserves a gun to his head, and you would do it if you could get away with it.
I should share his fate as should anybody else who would dare speak a word in defense of him.
Clearly all his ministry would defend him as well, so according to you they deserve to be killed to.
All those little old ladies who watch the 700 club, and send him money and believe have to go as well, I presume, seeing as they share many of the same beliefs and would defend him.
Am I correct, or are there more people deserving of death for the crime of devaluation that we’re missing?
That would be a fairly good start, theoretically speaking (and it would be a very bad thing for anyone to try to move such a thing out of the realm of theory). If there were a way to get rid of Robertson and all his minions, the cause of equality would be advanced a great, great deal. That would be a good thing.
Who started it makes all the difference in the world.
Demonising those who have done nothing to you is evil.
Demonising those who fuck with you for no reason is being realistic.
“The fucking difference,” Scylla, is that I didn’t choose to be gay, nor have I done anything to harm him. He chose to be a filthy, brainless, fundamentalist git, and to make one of his priorities the denial and diminshment of my civil rights.
And again, AFAIC, chipping away at my civil rights until I’m only half a person in the eyes of the law, a cut-rate, second-class citizen, is WORSE than killing me. It’s akin to slavery.
Oh bullshit! What civil right has Pat Robertson deprived you of? What civil right has he denied you? How has he enslaved you? What has he done to deserve your hate?
What power does he wield to enslave you?
Who do you think got hurt worse with his stupid little blaming gays for 9/11 comment, him or you?
He’s said some mean things about gays, but nothing as bad as you’ve said about me. I have done nothing but have a conversation with you.
He didn’t say anything as bas as what Sistah Souldjah said. Are you white? Do you hate her as well for advocating race murder?
Fortunately I don’t appear to be as fragile as you. Your hateful comments haven’t devalued my life, Pat’s life, or the life of any Christian fundamentalist.
IMO the opinion they’ve devalued you, just as Pat’s comments devalued him.
I got bad news for you. If nasty rhetoric alone can devalue a person, there ain’t a group on this earth with a penny to their portfolios.