Pat Robertson Flips a Shit Over the Recently Passed Matthew Shepard Act

Not being allowed to hate people is a hindrance to the free exercise of religion. Every time a revision to hate crimes laws in discussed, the Christians whine and whine and whine about their “right” to scream hateful and violent things (under the guise of religious expression) being taken away.

In the above video Pat Robertson asks the question, “What’s gonna happen if someone preaches a sermon: ‘Homosexuality is a sin. Here’s what the Bible says. Here’s chapter and verse.’  And all of a sudden, somebody leaves that congregation and goes up, beats up on somebody who is a homosexual.  Does that kick back on the pastor?  Is he now guilty of a hate crime?”

Well, depending on the chapter and verse, yes.  If the pastor spends a Sunday screaming about Leviticus 20:13 (“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”) and then one of the congregation slips out to the nearest gay bar and opens fire on the patrons, the pastor’s hate speech is a direct influence and a direct cause of the attack.  And now there is the legal power to prosecute the pastor for his part in the attack.

In this country, that situation would never happen.  No judge would rule against a pastor for an anti-gay sermon, but that is simply an instance where the judiciary needs to catch up to the legislature.  Is it really a bad thing that now pastors have to watch what they say to their flock?  Pastors haven’t always had to deal with the real world consequences of their words, but now they do.  I don’t see how this is a bad thing.

If I said on this blog, “All Christians are evil, according to The Atheist Bible (Damnations 12:32-33), so they must be killed.  Their blood will be upon themselves and no one else, because they have it coming,” and then Jessica Sideways goes on a massive killing spree, shooting her way through dozens of churches, I would be held accountable for my hateful speech in court.  So why should it be any different when the warring parties are reversed?  If one day in Colorado, some douchebag pastor preaches from Leviticus that all gays must die, and I wake up to find that Jessica Sideways and Bryan Kaufman, my two authors in Colorado, were ruthlessly slaughtered by one of the members of that church, why would I not be able to seek justice against the pastor and hold him accountable for his words?

Pat then goes on to spout, “And so this will be a law to muzzle speech and create a climate of fear on those who would speak out against this issue in terms of what the Bible says.  The Bible will not matter anymore as a question of, ‘what does the hate crimes law say.’”

When has the Bible mattered in court?  The Bible’s ancient ramblings have nothing to do with the judiciary in this country.  You can’t be sentenced to death for going to work on Sunday.  No judge will put you away for wearing a cotton/poly blend sweater.  No jury would ever convict you of not being a virgin on your wedding night.  So why would we go to the Bible to see what is and isn’t a hate crime?  The Bible is wholly irrelevant in court.  Would you use the Bible to justify the actions of a man who murdered his daughter for having sex before marriage?  Why, then, would you use it to justify hatred against gays?  We’ve moved on in the past several thousand years, and we no longer get our governance from the ancient laws of the Jews.

Pat says later, after talking down the importance of what happened to Matthew Shepard, “We shouldn’t be a nation that hates people, no matter what they do.”  This, from the man who calls Hinduism “devil worship,” calls liberalism “Nazism,” prayed that more SCOTUS justices would die before the Bush administration ended, blamed 9/11 on feminists, gays and the ACLU, preaches that women were put here to serve men and called for the nuclear obliteration of the US State Department.

Then, Pat Robertson became intentionally offensive, by referring to the expansion of hate crimes laws as, “the noose has tightened around the necks of Christians.”

What the fuck, Pat?!  A noose?  Really?  The reason we even have hate crimes laws is because of the hateful acts against black people perpetrated by WASPs like him.  And the most hateful of those acts involved a noose.  How dare he refer to laws that protect minorities from the ignorant horde as the weapon the ignorant horde used against minorities!

The show then goes on to whine about LGBT people getting, “extra protection.”  I’m sorry, folks, but not everyone needs the same protection.  (Anyone who has ever purchased sunscreen, condoms or tampons knows that!)  The majority needs only a little protection from the minority while the minority needs more protection against the majority.  If you can’t see that, let me demonstrate:

You are the ruler of Ye Olde Kingdom of Wartopia.  Your kingdom is divided into two groups who don’t like each other.  The larger group consists of 30,000 people who wear grey, brown and flesh-tone shirts and believe in The Old GQ Testament where it says that earth tone fabrics make better clothing.  Between them, they have 60,000 swords (one and a spare for each person), 25 catapults, 2,000 spears and control of 95% of the kingdom’s blacksmith shoppes and 98% of the police forces.

The smaller group consists of 3,000 people who wear pink, lilac and rainbow-coloured shirts and believe in The New GQ Testament where it says that colourful, shiny and glittery fabrics make better clothing.  Between them, they have 1,500 swords (one every two people), 2 catapults, 50 spears and control of 5% of the kingdom’s blacksmith shoppes and 2% of the police forced.  They are outnumbered 10 to 1.

Your duty as king is to keep all of your subjects safe from outside forces and from each other.  If you fail at your duty and your subjects start kill each other, it will sow distrust in your rule and lead to a revolution in which you are stripped of your power and assassinated, and worse, you will be made fun of by other kings for your inability to lead.

Who would you put more emphasis on protecting?

It is not a bad thing to give special or extra protection to minorities when the majority is hostile to them.  If you are complaining that minority groups are getting more protection than you under the law, the odds are that you don’t need extra protection.

Pat Robertson, you’re a douche.

CrooksAndLiars.com calls Pat out on a few other lies from this episode of 700 Club that I didn’t cover.