Pat Robertson Is Dead, A Metaphor Of Our Times

Yesterday morning, I awoke to find that the famous televangelist nutjob Pat Robertson died at age ninety-three. William Buckley, the founder of the right-wing magazine National Review and person widely considered the father of post-World War Two conservatism, once described a conservative as somebody who stands athwart the gates of history yelling “stop.” That describes Pat Robertson perfectly, who even until his dying days held many of the same views the most radical of the religious right held in the 1950s-1980s. Even as recently as 2013, Robertson was warning about the evils of the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons. Robertson was the kind of man who never took an issue with a husband abusing his wife. And Robertson would find some way to tie anything and everything bad in this country to things he didn’t like. Rather it be him nodding along as his late friend Jerry Falwell infamously blamed the terrorist attack on 9/11/2001 on the ACLU and People For the American Way or him saying the Earthquakes in Haiti in 2011 were the fault of the nation making a deal with the Devil to get independence, it seemed like God was always on Pat Robertson’s side — and that sure is one massive coincidence. Either way, I think it says something that one of Robertson’s most infamous quotes sees him blaming feminism — something he doesn’t like — for a large amount of other things he doesn’t like:

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.

Of course, given Robertson defended China’s forced abortions needed to enforce their one child policy back in 2001, it seems like actual baby killing wasn’t that large of a concern to him. Even his hatred of divorce seemed to be born out of sexism as opposed to dislike for the concept, given he once gave a husband of a woman with Alzheimer’s full permission to divorce his wife.

Just like his fellow members of the religious right — Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed come to mind — he knew from the start that he never had any chance at convincing the majority of the nation to think like him. The one time he attempted to run for office — his brief Presidential Campaign in 1988 — he was…