Pat Robertson

On today’s episode of the 700 Club, Pat Robertson urged viewers to avoid false prophets and televangelists caught up in scandal. “By your fruits you shall know them, what’s their track record?” Robertson told cohost Terry Meeuwsen, “You can dominate somebody that way: I’ve heard from the Lord, I have a message for you, do this.”

Funny he should mention this, because just today we stumbled across an interview between Pat Robertson and televangelist Benny Hinn the week before the presidential election where Robertson bluntly informed Hinn that “the Lord told me” that Mitt Romney would defeat President Obama.

Not only did God inform Robertson that “Romney will win” but that he will be a two-term president who presides over a huge economic boom.

Robertson even told Romney to save him a ticket for the inauguration: “I told Mitt a long time ago, I called him and said listen, I’ve been in prayer and number one you’re going to win the nomination and number two you’re going to win the general election, he said ‘well what can I do for you,’ I said give me a seat on the platform during your inauguration, give me a ticket to your inauguration.”

“The Lord said he’s going to have a second term, I told him there will be to be trillions of dollars coming into the economy when you’re elected,” Robertson continued, “the stock market ought to boom, everything ought to boom.”

This all deeply reassured Hinn who said that Robertson was conveying “God’s voice.”

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Today on the 700 Club, Pat Robertson insisted that gays and lesbians can “change their sexual preference” just like murders, rapists and thieves can change themselves. He later warned that the U.S. is on the verge of adopting hate speech laws.

Robertson, who has repeatedly promoted ex-gay therapy, said that just as gay people can change their orientation, “a murderer can change, a rapist can change, a thief can change.” Robertson was reacting to a case in Ecuador, where a politician was found to have violated his country’s electoral code’s prohibition on discrimination by making anti-gay remarks.

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Today on the 700 Club, Pat Robertson said that Margaret Sanger “was the one who set the stage for Adolf Hitler, she didn’t copy him, he copied her.” After running a story about how President Obama postponed his speech at Planned Parenthood in order to attend a memorial service in Texas for victims of the fertilizer plant explosion, Roberston said that the group founded by Sanger is “evil” and targets black people.

“What they said was, they said ‘what we’ve got to do in order to get the black people in America to have abortions, we have to have some noted black leader who will come out for Planned Parenthood and we’ll give him the Margaret Sanger award and therefore he will be our poster boy showing the black people they should have abortions,” Robertson maintained, “it was strictly genocide.”

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While Sanger was tied to the eugenics movement, the claim that she intended to exterminate black people and use black leaders to hide such a plan is based on a quote taken badly out of context.

As PolitiFact reports, the eugenics movement was widely popular at the time of Sanger’s work, but there is “no evidence that Sanger advocated - privately or publicly - for anything even resembling the ‘genocide’ of blacks, or that she thought blacks are genetically inferior”:

"I have never run into any serious academic reference of Sanger or others wanting to ‘kill black babies,’" Indiana University professor Ruth Engs, a eugenics movement expert, told PolitiFact Georgia in an e-mail.

The Washington Post also “found nothing to confirm these allegations” that Sanger targeted the black community for genocide and noted that even Martin Luther King, Jr. had praised her work.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org debunked the claim when Herman Cain made the same argument as Robertson:

Cain isn’t the first to believe that birth control advocate Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) wanted to stop the birth of black babies. Just do an Internet search and see what happens. Sanger made more than her share of controversial comments. But the quote many point to as evidence that Sanger favored something akin to “genocide” of African Americans has been turned on its head.

Sanger, who was arrested several times in her efforts to bring birth control to women in the United States, set up her first clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. In the late 1930s, she sought to bring clinics to black women in the South, in an effort that was called the “Negro Project.” Sanger wrote in 1939 letters to colleague Clarence James Gamble that she believed the project needed a black physician and black minister to gain the trust of the community:

Sanger, 1939: The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

Sanger says that a minister could debunk the notion, if it arose, that the clinics aimed to “exterminate the Negro population.” She didn’t say that she wanted to “exterminate” the black population. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University says that this quote has “gone viral on the Internet,” normally out of context, and it “doesn’t reflect the fact that Sanger recognized elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow south, unless clergy and other community leaders spread the word that the Project had a humanitarian aim.”

It goes on to characterize beliefs such as Cain’s as “extremist.” The project says: “No serious scholar and none of the dozens of black leaders who supported Sanger’s work have ever suggested that she tried to reduce the black population or set up black abortion mills, the implication in much of the extremist anti-choice material.”

Pat Robertson knows that demonic spirits are behind everything from homosexuality and Halloween to karate and secondhand sweaters, and so it came as no surprise today when he warned 700 Club viewers that Dungeons & Dragons is a “demonic” game.

In response to a question regarding whether it is ok to “enjoy video games that have magic in them,” Robertson warned that such games are part of the “occult” and urged the questioner to “flee from evil.” He said that is especially the case when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons, which has “literally destroyed people’s lives.”

Watch:

• Ben Dimiero & Eric Hananoki @ Media Matters: Alex Jones And His Enablers.
• Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion: Todd Bentley Claims Miracles in South Africa, “Hundreds of Muslims and Hindus” Converted.
• Cavan Sieczkowski @ The Huffington Post: Pat Robertson On Boston Explosions: 'Don't Talk To Me About Religion Of Peace.'
• David @ Crooks and Liars: Fox News' Keith Ablow: Tea Partiers 'Enslaved' and 'Slaves Always Revolt.'
• Alvin McEwen: Bryan Fischer's interview with Paul Cameron is a boon for the gay community.
• Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Brennan baffled by Bachmann at briefing.
• Scott Keyes @ Think Progress: Tea Party Congressman Uses Boston Marathon Bombing To Justify Opposing Immigration Reform.

In response to a question from a 700 Club viewer who wonders if his unnamed chronic illness is part of “‘the plan’ God has for my life,” Pat Robertson explained that the viewer was really to blame because of his negativity

Based solely on the short question, Robertson told the viewer that “many of the problems that you have come about from your attitude, your own reaction to things, your own abilities, your own work.”

“Chronic illness can often come about from psychosomatic problems, I don’t want to make a broad statement,” Robertson continued, “It just sounds like that you’ve got a negative attitude.”

Robertson finished with a Word-Faith teaching about how the viewer can simply speak happiness and health, rather than negativity, into existence: “You literally can speak into the world around you and the results begin to change and if you speak negatively you will have negative, so don’t say it’s ‘God’s plan’ I think that’s a misnomer.”

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Televangelist Pat Robertson is joining the ranks of right-wing commentators who claim that the Department of Homeland Security is stockpiling vehicles and ammunition to use against Americans.

“Long trains full of armored vehicles, personnel carriers with armor, what are they for, the army going into battle against the enemy? They're used by Homeland Security against us,” Robertson ominously warned. “Imagine what Homeland Security is doing is just awful and we’re going to talk about how much ammunition they’re stockpiling: who are they going to shoot, us?” 

The conspiracy about secretive ammo stockpiling is completely unfounded.

According to the Associated Press, the ammunition is used in trainings for “tens of thousands of federal law enforcement officers” and for the use of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

As Media Matters pointed out, DHS does own light armored vehicles for emergencies and raids on drug cartels, and the recent purchases of such vehicles were actually for the U.S. Marine Corps.

In fact, the conspiracy theory is so baseless that even the NRA has debunked it.

Pat Robertson has been on the attack against environmentalists as of late, and yesterday the 700 Club host warned that environmentalist policies may cause billions of people to die.

Robertson maintained that the “out of control” Environmental Protection Agency “has been run by doctrinaire leftists” who are attacking “American industry, especially fossil fuels.”

After he went on a rant about new rules impacting coal power plants, Robertson said that the ultimate “goal” of the environmental movement is to create “a more pastoral, rural kind of existence and if a couple billion people around the globe die from starvation because of it that’s just tough luck.”

Watch:

• David Edwards @ Raw Story: Pat Robertson says bankrupt families should give him ‘just $20 a month.’
• Alan Colmes: Republican Leader Henry Barbour Calls Obama A Socialist.
• Kent Jones @ The Maddow Blog: Great moments in misleading headlines.
• Aviva Shen @ Think Progress: How The NRA Secretly Protects People Who Commit Crimes With Guns.
• Jeremy Hooper: American Family Association goes after Amazon, Microsoft.
• John Cook @ Gawker: Bill O’Reilly’s Divorce Is So Ugly, God Got Involved.