Pat Robertson

Bill Bennett appeared on The 700 Club today to promote his new book The Book of Man. He and Pat Robertson used the time to lament the rise of women in American society and the supposed decimation of manhood. Bennett claimed that “feminism” and “gay culture” confused and blurred gender lines, and seemed to mourn the fact that women are now taking positions of authority in society once reserved only for men. Robertson cited the promotion of Virginia Rometty, who is succeeding Sam Palmisano to be CEO of IBM, and warned of a pending “matriarchy.”

Watch:

Bennett: What feminism did I think, Pat, was confuse the debate to some extent by saying those expectations we have of boys, the kinds of responsibilities that they will need to take up as men, we’re not sure we need them anymore because we’re not sure we need men any more, well we do need men.

Robertson: Well you know it’s interesting in the news today was the changing of the guard at IBM where Palmisano is changing off and a woman’s taking his position as head of this great corporation, IBM.

Bennett: That’s right and there’s just a ton of that…fine all power to the women and the girls, as long as we don’t confuse roles and the differences in genders. Boys have to wake up! We got to wake them up!

Robertson: What’s this going to do to society, if men don’t take their places as men and suddenly there’s a gap and women and we have a matriarchy. What will this do ultimately to society?

Bennett: I think it can hurt society, maybe grievously. Interestingly the feminists are not celebrating this Pat, they want men too. They might want to rail against this and they may want to talk about stereotypes of man and male domination and so on, but women want men. They want men for that strong arm, they want men for that protection, they want men for a partner in marriage and so it’s something that has got very blurred and what I try to do in this book is remind people of things that are true. And to the boys, as you very well said, the array of things offered on TV and elsewhere is very confusing, from macho stuff to gay culture to all sorts of things. What I got here is a point of view that is time tested, based in tradition that will get boys to manhood.

Today on The 700 Club televangelist and past Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson warned that the Republican primary base is pushing their party’s potential nominees to such extremes that they will be unelectable. While Robertson has said that he will not make an endorsement this cycle, in 2008 he caught flak from many in the Religious Right for supporting Rudy Giuliani. After a segment on Herman Cain’s ever-changing and completely incoherent views on abortion rights, Robertson told viewers that he thinks that the Republican presidential nominee may be unelectable if he or she embraces all of the policy positions of the party’s far-right base.

When even Pat Robertson thinks the Republican Party has shifted too far to the right, you know there is a problem:

I believe it was Lyndon Johnson that said, ‘Don’t these people realize if they push me over to an extreme position I’ll lose the election? And I’m the one who will be supporting what they want but they’re going to make it so I can’t win.’ Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They’re forcing their leaders, the frontrunners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election. Now whether this did it to Cain I don’t know, but nevertheless, you appeal to the narrow base and they’ll applaud the daylights out of what you’re saying and then you hit the general election and they say ‘no way’ and then the Democrat, whoever it is, is going to just play these statements to the hilt. They’ve got to stop this! It’s just so counterproductive!

…

Well, if they want to lose, this is the game for losers.

Given Pat Robertson's record of offering questionable advice to viewers seeking his counsel, it is a wonder that people keep writing in and seeking his help with their problems and questions.

But they do ... just today, a woman wrote in telling Robertson that her family is struggling financially and can't pay their mortgage or bills and wondering why God was won't answer her prayers, to which Robertson responded that she was obviously just not managing her money properly and told her that she must continue to tithe in order to receive God's blessing:

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This morning on the Today Show Mitt Romney and Chris Christie repeated their call for Rick Perry to disassociate himself from pastor Robert Jeffress because of the pastor’s denigration of Romney’s Mormon faith. Yesterday, Christie even compared Jeffress to “those folks in New Jersey who disparaged in both parties my decision to appoint a Muslim judge” and said that any “campaign that associates itself with that type of comment is beneath the office of President of the United States, in my view.”

Ironically, one of the people who slammed Christie over his criticism of anti-Muslim activists is Jay Sekulow, who endorsed and introduced Romney at the Values Voter Summit last week and in 2008 was a member of Romney’s “National Faith and Values Steering Committee.”

In fact, Sekulow and his organization, the American Center for Law and Justice, which was founded by Pat Robertson, tried to prevent American Muslims from exercising their First Amendment rights by suing to block the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan and also issued a pamphlet which claims that Sharia law is on the brink of eclipsing the U.S. Constitution that “devout Muslims cannot truthfully swear the oath to become citizens of the United States of America.” Tim Murphy pointed out the irony in Romney condemning anti-Muslim bigot Bryan Fischer while praising Sekulow, and People For the American Way urged Romney to disavow Sekulow in the same way he has urged Perry to “repudiate” Jeffress:

“Mitt Romney is right to criticize his rivals for silently standing by and accepting bigotry,” said Michael Keegan, President of People For the American Way. “Now it is time for him to apply those standards to his own campaign. The truly courageous position for Romney to take would be to stand up against religious bigotry of all stripes – including the GOP’s increasingly prevalent scapegoating of American Muslims.

“Romney endorser Jay Sekulow’s American Center for Law and Justice has suggested that devout Muslims cannot become true citizens of the United States. Sekulow himself has perpetuated the debunked claim that the Constitution is under a threat from Sharia law and was a leader of the extremist backlash against the building of an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, including overseeing the ACLJ’s lawsuit attempting to stop the community center’s construction.

“Last weekend, Mitt Romney called Sekulow a ‘treasure.’ If Romney wishes to show that he is a true champion of the American values of religious freedom and tolerance, he must apply the same standard to his own endorsers as he does to those of Rick Perry.”

But Sekulow isn’t the only anti-Muslim activist in the Romney camp.

Walid Phares was recently named a foreign policy adviser to Romney. As the Council on American Islamic Relations pointed out in a letter [pdf] to Rep. Peter King, Phares has close ties to a Lebanese militiamen and even served as an official in a militia that was “implicated, by Israel’s official Kahan inquiry and other sources, in the 1982 massacre of civilian men, women and children at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.”

Phares also claims [pdf] that “jihadists within the West pose as civil rights advocates, interested solely in the ‘rights’ of their immigrant communities” in order for their “institutions [to] fall into their hands,” and warns of the “spread of Wahhabism” through Muslim infiltration of “the U.S. armed forces and ultimately even into the Pentagon.”

While Romney was willing to call out Jeffress and Fischer over their intolerant rhetoric, it is uncertain if he will apply that standard to his own campaign.

Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition appeared on The 700 Club today with Pat Robertson, alleging that the Bible warned us of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the book of Zachariah. Lapin went on to say that the attacks were “based on a dream that Adolf Hitler had in 1943.” No word if Lapin ever intended to warn Americans about the attacks before 9/11, or if the Bible had anything to say about how People For the American Way and gays were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, another theory concocted on The 700 Club.

Watch:

Lapin: The Torah, in ancient Jewish wisdom the Bible, actually explains something which we have lived through which is one of the great mysteries: the plot of 9/11.

Robertson: Really!

Lapin: The plot of 9/11. Not only do we find references in Zachariah to four mysterious crafts that come through between two mountains made of metal, in biblical terminology mountains can be natural mountains or also anything tall that grows up like two buildings, also the idea that the plot was hatched not in Mecca or Medina or Riyadh or anywhere else in Saudi Arabia, that plot was hatched in Hamburg, Germany, and was based on a dream that Adolf Hitler had in 1943 which was to fly suicide Luftwaffe German air force bombers into the towers of Manhattan.

Robertson: Are you serious, that was Hitler’s dream?

Lapin: That was a Hitler dream described in a book called ‘Spandau Diary’ written by one of the Nazis who was captured after the war and who witnessed, and actually I’ve seen drawings, and I don’t doubt for a moment that the Muslim plotters, in the mosque in Hamburg who laid out the plans for 9/11, I don’t doubt for a moment that they encountered those same plans. I don’t think they thought of this themselves. This was the fulfillment of a dream that was really put in place early on in World War II.

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Today on The 700 Club, Pat Robertson faced a question from a viewer who wondered about the ethicality of his church’s haunted house event, which uses Halloween to reach the “unsaved community.” Robertson condemned the church and said that Christians shouldn’t celebrate the holiday because “Halloween is Satan’s night, it’s the night for the devil.”

This wouldn’t be the first time the Christian Broadcasting Network targeted Halloween. Apostle Kimberly Daniels, who now serves on the Jacksonville City Council, wrote a long screed on the CBN website condemning the holiday for its “occult roots.” She claims that demonic curses from witches are passed through Halloween candy and that traditional activities include “sex with demons,” “orgies” and “sacrificing babies,” among others.

Watch:

Meeuwsen: This is Ken, he says ‘Pat, it may sound odd, but Halloween is one of the biggest events at my church. Every year, we host one of the area’s largest haunted houses. They say it’s a great outreach to the unsaved community, but it’s starting to irk me. I feel really unsettled by the fact that our church has a Haunted House. What are your thoughts?’

Robertson: I agree with you, we need the power of God not some kind of ersatz entertainment. We don’t believe in haunted, we don’t believe in ghosts, we don’t believe in all this business.

Meeuwsen: You don’t celebrate it.

Robertson: Halloween is Satan’s night, it’s the night for the devil. It’s All Hallow’s Eve but its time when witches and goblins—

Meeuwsen: Ok that’s evident in the kinds of things that are for sale.

Robertson: Of course, it’s out there. Its skeletons and all this, like the dead rising. Churches shouldn’t do that, you should do something else besides having a haunted house. I’m sure it’s popular, it is probably a big deal, people come to get scared, you’ve got spiders and cobwebs and all that. But—you can bob for apples, you can do all kind of different things and have a big party.

Meeuwsen: Most churches have actually an alternative evening for families.

Robertson: That’s what you need but not a haunted house, I agree with you. You’re feeling badly? You should.

Anti-Muslim activists have been making the rounds in Religious Right media recently, including Frank Gaffney’s weeklong love fest with Rick Joyner, Robert Spencer’s and Pamela Geller’s appearances on Janet Mefferd’s show, and Steve Emerson’s interview with Jerry Newcombe of Truth in Action Ministries. Yesterday, Spencer joined Newcombe on his show Truth that Transforms, where the two conflated progressives’ support for civil rights for Muslims with support for extremism. Spencer told Newcombe that “the left doesn’t really like America or western civilization” so they “see in Islam” an influential “ally.” He made a similar argument on The 700 Club with Pat Robertson, when he asserted that the supposedly liberal media “hate” everything “that’s American, that’s Western, that’s Christian, that’s Judeo-Christian.”

Listen:

Newcombe: I find it a phenomenon right now in our culture at large if you look at a lot of liberals and so-called progressives and so forth, let’s say even organizations like the ACLU, that supposedly are in favor of women’s rights and so forth, and yet these liberals by and large embrace Islam more than they do historic, traditional Christianity.

Spencer: It is ridiculous but it is very commonplace. I mean what we have really is that the left doesn’t really like America or western civilization and so I think that they see in Islam an another entity that doesn’t like western civilization and so they see it, in it an ally, and that’s essentially what’s going on.