Bye bye, Pat Robertson

Pat Robertson is now leaving the stage. He's retiring from the 700 Club, the popular TV program he hosted on the Christian Broadcasting Network he built with the profits from his diamond mine in Africa. Which he bought with the widows' mites he fleeced from the innocents in his audience who believed their responses to his televangelist appeals for cash were a way of bringing about God's kingdom on this earth.

The world can only wish him a speedy journey into oblivion.

I learned a lot about power from this man and how it works. When he exercised the power he had from the millions of dollars he earned preaching to the religiously gullible, he was a dangerous evil man, somebody to fear and work to oppose. Gay people suffered greatly from his pronouncements in the days when he was taken seriously by mainstream America. He regularly preached that gays were responsible for hurricanes and maybe even a meteor. And even claimed that they wore special rings designed to cut into people's flesh and give them AIDS. And, more recently, that they also brought on Covid.

Despite the fact that he wrapped himself in the banner of Christianity, his views of God were purely that of an Old Testament god of wrath who inflicted punishment, not a god of love, forgiveness and compassion. But those views are also shared by a large segment of the American evangelical population, or his message would have fallen on deaf ears. He's not alone in his folly; it takes two to tango.

As the gay liberation movement in the U.S. and other modern nations came of age, it became clear that he was little more than a clown, and not a particularly clever one. Gays were not the only people to laugh at him. Blacks too (and the general population, for that matter) saw the fool in him when he pronounced the Black Lives Matter movement a movement to bring about a "lesbian Marxist revolution."

People focused too much on the fact that he was a Trump supporter, and not enough on the fact that the reason for his support was his belief that Trump would bring on Armageddon. 

In any case, he's gone. And like with the urine stains my dogs left on our carpet when they were still puppies, it will take some scrubbing to erase his memory.

But the stains are gone.

And I trust the memory of this clown, too, will fade in short order.