Thursday, June 8, 2023

An ambivalent farewell:

I want to be very clear that I take no pleasure in the news that Pat Robertson died. I do however appreciate how Rolling Stone magazine chose to report on his passing: 
Nothing there is inaccurate.

I think the German word for this is
Gleichgültigkeit. Because of course it is.
Obviously I didn't know him personally, and I think he's said some pretty terrible things over the years, and influenced others to do and say some pretty terrible things, but I'm not happy he's dead. I take no freude, schaden or otherwise in this. I will admit however, that in the past there have been times when I, out of ideas and looking for something to blog about, searched his name, just to see if he'd done or said something infuriating, or hateful, or just plain dumb. I was rarely disappointed. 

Pictured: the big baby sacrifice at 
last year's Pride Festival. It was a hoot.
There was the time he denounced gay men as Molech worshipping baby murders. And that other time when a guy wrote in to complain about how disrespectful his wife is. Robertson immediately took his side, compared the woman to a disobedient child and suggested that this is because she wasn't smacked enough as a child. Oh, and then he suggested that they move to Saudi Arabia, so he can beat her legally. In a later installment of his show, he told straight married women to just put up with cheating. Because dudes gonna dude.

Wait, did he...did he think 
Game of Thrones was real?
Oh, and he also repeated an incredibly inflammatory, completely baseless urban legend/conspiracy theory about the gays wearing special rings with needles which infect the normies with HIV via an innocent handshake. Has this ever happened in the history of ever? No. Not even on Game of Thrones. But that didn't stop him from repeating it to his fans as the God's honest truth. And then, when called on it, he released a statement blaming everyone else for taking him out of context. Classic Pat.

So yeah, like I said. I'm not happy Pat Robertson is dead. I feel for his family, and, well, I was going to say his fans, but I guess I feel sorry for them. Them and their families, because there's a decent chance they've alienated more than a few of them by parroting the nonsense this guy put out there in his decades of televangelizing. So rather than saying something bad about Pat Robertson, I'll just leave this on a positive note:
Happy Pride month Pat Robertson, wherever you are!

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