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Sorry Pat, It’s Greed, Not the Gays

Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson, pampered son of a former US Senator, faith healing Baptist minister and former Republican candidate for the Presidency, has a tendency when a natural disaster or a crisis occurs to blame the poor, feminists, homosexuals and college professors as being responsible. It appears that God has a grudge against anyone who has almost no power in our society, except homosexuals, because, if we have learned anything the last few years, most of them appear to be Republican Congressmen or married to Michele Bachmann. Even though these were the kinds of people Jesus hung out with, it appears that they must have owed him some money, because His Father appears to be gunning for them.

After 9/11, Marion agreed with Jerry Falwell that, “The pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gay, and the lesbians [who have] helped [the terror attacks of September 11th] happen.” Because you and I know all those highjackers had copies of Betty Friedan’s Feminist Mystique on them and were wearing rainbow lapel pins. Do not even get me started on those darn pagans. My pagan neighbor was up all night building Stone Hedge in his backyard last evening.

When Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, Robertson did not blame global warming or, God forbid, that the levees failed because of maintenance neglect and the wetlands that buffered the coast had eroded because the Army Corps of Engineers did not have the resources to fix them properly. No, that would be too easy and kind of make logical sense. It seems that God caused Katrina because of America’s abortion policy. Huh? The two states that got hit the hardest were Louisiana and Mississippi. Louisiana ranks #23 in the nation in abortions per capita and Mississippi is not even in the top 25, which is unusual for the South, which loves their Jesus, but loves their abortions even more when you examine statistics.

It seems that if God were going to punish a state, it would be a navy blue state like Massachusetts or Oregon, not part of the Bible Belt… but the Almighty is always pounding the red states, the Jesus loving states, not those liberal states. Georgia, Oklahoma and Texas get droughts. Red states along the Mississippi and Missouri flood. Florida gets hurricanes and Rush Limbaugh. Delaware, where the most abortions occur per capita, gets… okay, they are one of the wealthiest per capita states, so that is not it, health care is pretty good there, so no go on that, no big natural disasters in a long time…. Hum, they do have a men’s and women’s professional soccer team? So, maybe Marion is right. God is punishing them.

When an earthquake hit Haiti, it was the poor’s fault because they made a “pact with the Devil” to free themselves from the heel of Napoleon III’s boot and slavery. Never mind that the Haitian revolution occurred in 1791 and Napoleon did not assume power until 1848. Facts smacks, he is making a point. The poor are poor because they deserve it, not because of a host of political, economic and social reasons.

Strangely, Pat Robertson has always failed to mention what pact he made with the devil, what grievous sin he committed, or what issue God had with him when Hurricane Bonnie, in 1998, smashed into his Virginia Beach headquarters, instead of heading south towards Disney World, where Gay Days was happening. While rainbow flags continued to fly across Orlando and Mickey and Goofy held hands, Pat got to pick up glass. I believe that rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. I think that is from The Bible or maybe from The Wrath of Khan.

It is hard to keep a good homophobe down, a few weeks ago, Pat let his ignorance fly again. After New York voted to allow gay marriage, Robertson stated that God might destroy America as a result. I am guessing that in Pat’s twisted logic, God has been okay with unmarried homosexuals having sex for centuries now because He has not wiped out America. Because the Almighty is deeply offended that gay people want to have sex in a committed relationship.

It should be noted that Pat’s father, Absalom Willis Robertson, felt that blacks and whites marrying was going to spell an end to America, was one of nineteen Senators to sign the Southern Manifesto decrying any attempt to desegregate public schools under Brown v. Board of Education, and was one of four Senators who refused to meet with President Lyndon Johnson during a whistle stop tour through the South to explain and garner support for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act. The apple does not fall far from the bigoted tree. A wise man once said, “The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son, and on the third and the fourth generations.” I think that was Indiana Jones who said that, but I could be wrong. I know I read it some place.

So, even though Absalom was wrong about blacks and whites getting married, Pat believes we are heading the way of Sodom and Gomorrah. Never mind that God destroyed those two cities because there were not ten righteous people there, not because it was a leather chaps haven of man love, and that it would be nearly impossible to find anyone in the American gay community that would think gang rape is a good idea and a positive thing. Everyone is allowed to misread their holy book if they want. If Pat decides to make the story of Sodom and Gomorrah about God destroying those two cities because a bunch of gay soccer dads wanting to legally protect their children and to make sure that the person they spent a lifetime with gets the right to make those life and death decisions at the end, plan their funerals, keep their loved one’s property, and the over 1,000 legal rights that married couples enjoy, then he is welcome to it.

Still, Pat Robertson and other Republicans should read their holy book again because if God is going to destroy this nation, it is not because Jack and John jumped over the candlestick with rings on their fingers. If God turn the United States into a real life Roland Emmerich film, it is because of the greed of Christians like Pat Robertson. If anything kills this country, it will be greed, not the gays.

Greed is not good. If this country goes the way of the hundreds of empires and nations that have come before, it will be because of greedy people like Pat Robertson, a man who used humanitarian aid for the genocide in Rwanda to engage in the blood diamond trade in Liberia. It will be because we were too greedy to stop polluting our rivers, streams and oceans. It will be because we turned the earth into a shake and bake oven because we refused to listen to 97 percent of climate scientists about climate change and make the slow transition to eco-friendly technology. Drill, baby, drill. It will be because we were not good caretakers of the gifts we were given, the animals. We paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Joni Mitchell said that.

If anything causes God to lift his protective hand, it will be how we treat the poor among us to give a little bit more to the greedy. The elephant in the room that no one is talking about is that the middle class has been washing out slowly over the last three decades. When the middle class goes bye-bye, there goes America.

We pay the lowest taxes, let me repeat, the lowest taxes in the industrialized world and that is not good enough, we want them lower, especially for the greedy, excuse me the job producers, who are sitting on piles of money but not producing jobs. We are paying the lowest tax rates since the 1950s and that is not good enough. We want them lower, especially for the upper 1 percent, who have accumulated 80 percent of the wealth produced in this nation over the last 30 years. The Democrats threw a good chunk of “Head Start,” a program that in the long run saves us money, over the side without much of a fight. The Republicans fight like mad to keep sending your tax dollars in corporate welfare to the oil companies who are enjoying record profits. Unions smashed. Teachers’ salaries cut. For you people who sell things, lets call them the buyers. It is not a revenue problem. It is a greed problem. Every time God lifts his protective hand from his people it is because they are stealing from the poor for a pair of sandals. Today, it would be for a corporate jet.

Eighty-one year old Pat Robertson’s personal wealth is estimated to be between $200 million to $1 billion. He lives on a private mountain with an airstrip and a private jet. He owns racehorses and dozens of companies that have nothing to do with Christianity. There is nothing wrong with that because, as any good Christian knows, if Jesus was alive today, he’d be rich. It is easy to see why Pat would rather talk about the gays than being greedy. Can someone ask Marion, if that dromedary he will be riding through the eye of a needle has one hump or two. I forget who said that. So, it seems does Pat. How many humps does yours have?