I’m used to word salad from Pat, but this is special:

[h/t Joe]

As Brian at Right Wing Watch says, “when even Pat Robertson thinks the Republican Party has shifted too far to the right, you know there is a problem.” Mind you, Pat’s not saying he necessarily disagrees with the far right platforms of the GOP candidates, but he’s looking at it from a strategic perspective and at least is aware that the majority of the American public just isn’t in line with far right Republican values. Here is Pat saying, in essence, that if the 2012 Republican candidates don’t stop being such freakish wingnuts, that they will all lose to Barack Obama, a million times.

Heh. Head over to RWW for the transcript.

As Pat so wisely says in this video, “Halloween is the night when witches and goblins.” Seriously, he develops that thought no further. Also, it is Satan’s night, etc.

Presented for entertainment purposes only.

[h/t PZ Myers]

All righty, then, Pat.  He’s like, “she’s basically dead anyway, right?”

[h/t Kyle]

I’m quite sure Newt Gingrich would agree, and ask a follow-up like, “What if she just has a cold or stubs her toe? I can divorce her then, too, right?”

Seems like Joe and I had the exact same reaction to Pat Robertson’s statement on the DC earthquake:

Ladies and gentlemen I don’t want to get weird on this so please take it for what it’s worth. But it seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America’s power, it has been the symbol of our great nation, we look at that monument and say this is one nation under God. Now there’s a crack in it, there’s a crack in it and it’s closed up. Is that a sign from the Lord? Is that something that has significance or is it just result of an earthquake? You judge, but I just want to bring that to your attention. It seems to me symbolic. When Jesus was crucified and when he died the curtain in the Temple was rent from top to bottom and there was a tear and it was extremely symbolic, is this symbolic? You judge.

My god, these people vote.

And what’s in Virginia?  Hmmmm, Liberty U and Pat Robertson’s empire.

And what’s in Colorado?  Hmmmm, Focus on the Family.

BLAME IT ON GAYS NOW, PAT.

Heehee.  Also, read Wonkette.

As Brian at Right Wing Watch points out, the idea that reparative therapy is a discredited and ineffective practice is nothing new. Mainstream researchers have been showing in their work for years that “praying away the gay” simply doesn’t work, and that you can’t change your orientation by marrying someone of the opposite sex [the "equality" that trolls like Bryan Fischer like to suggest that LGBT people already have].  But in a significant development, one of the Religious Right’s in-house studies seems to have just shown the same thing.  A new study from Regent University [yes, Pat Robertson's outfit], looked at mixed-orientation marriages, where one partner is straight and the other one isn’t, to measure changes in their actual sexual orientation vis a vis their sexual behavior, over time.  What they found will not be surprising to any readers here:

Unsurprisingly, they found on the Kinsey scale that measured sexual behavior that gay, bisexual or queer spouses had more heterosexual behavior when they were involved in a monogamous marriage to someone of the opposite sex. But they found that heterosexual behavior did not mean changes in sexual attraction, emotions or fantasies in the Kinsey scale (Kinsey Expanded) which measured sexual orientation. Essentially, while their sexual behavior changed, their sexual orientation remained the same.

In other words, not only can you not pray away the gay, but you also can’t expect to marry someone of the opposite sex and fake it until you make it. [Haha.]

The idea that people’s sexual behavior changed is unsurprising.  People force themselves to do things that are unnatural for them all the time.  But for the Religious Right, this argument has always been about sexual behavior, as they like to claim again and again that sexuality is really about behavior anyway, and that it’s a choice.  It’s significant for a wingnut school to release a study refuting that notion and acknowledging that sexual orientation is a separate entity and that it can’t be changed simply by modifying one’s behavior.

File this under “Look, they just moved the goalposts closer to our position again.”

Weekly Column

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) had a good run. The group, led by anti-gay activists Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown, has been able to demagogue and exploit existing anti-LGBT prejudice and foment new fears by lying about the allegedly negative impact marriage equality would have on civilization.

Unfortunately for NOM, the vote to legalize marriage equality in New York means the jig is almost up. The dead-end desperation was evident in Brown’s response to a question posed by a reporter that asked whether the success in New York could be exported to other states. He called this notion “a joke” and said, “They’ve never been able to win a popular vote.”

True, but until Friday’s New York state senate vote, the gay rights movement had also never won a marriage fight in a Republican-led legislative chamber. Brown doesn’t understand that the landscape has radically shifted.

Indeed, for the first time in history a Gallup poll showed that the number of Americans that support marriage equality crossed the 50 percent threshold (53%).  These results were not an anomaly and have been confirmed by several credible, independent polls.

Most worrisome for Brown should be the next generation, which isn’t buying his bigotry. The Gallup poll found that support for marriage equality was most robust between the ages of 18-34, and significantly weaker among those 55 and older. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to see a precipitous fall in Brown’s crystal ball.

NOM’s primary argument has been that it represents the will of the people. Now that they are increasingly on the wrong side of the public opinion divide, will NOM replace their tyranny of the majority creed with an elitist argument proclaiming that the “moral minority” knows better than the American people?

Another tactic used by the anti-gay crowd is to bleat about the allegedly dire societal consequences of same-sex marriage. Following New York’s vote, Rev. Pat Robertson predicted that America would become the next Sodom: “There isn’t one single civilization that has survived that openly embraced homosexuality. So you say, ‘what’s going to happen to America?’ Well if history is any guide, the same thing’s going to happen to us.”

The politics of fear worked well in the past. Marriage equality was first laughed off as a strange invention created by weird hash-smoking Dutch people and socialist Scandinavians. Next, the fundamentalists sneered at the liberal New England states. Then Iowa happened, placing marriage equality in the heartland. Next, the District of Columbia plopped scary old “gay marriage” right in the center of the nation’s capital. And now we have New York, which overnight doubled the number of people in states with marriage equality. (The Williams Institute reports that 11 percent of the US population now lives in states that allow gay couples to marry)

The American people are wising up to the gloom and doom rhetoric of activists like Rev. Pat Roberson and Brian Brown. They can see the corn is still growing in Iowa. The cows are still mooing in Vermont. The partisans are still causing gridlock in DC. And, of course, Broadway plays will still thrill audiences and Wall Street trading will continue after the first same-sex couple marries in New York.

The clear lack of genuine “consequences” has led some conservatives to reexamine their opposition. For example, commentator David Frum revealed to CNN this week that he now supports marriage equality: “Since 1997, same-sex marriage has evolved from talk to fact. If people like me had been right, we should have seen the American family become radically more unstable over the subsequent decade and a half. Instead – while American family stability has continued to deteriorate – it has deteriorated much more slowly than it did in the 1970’s and 1980’s before same-sex marriage was even thought of.”

New York’s new law will introduce more Americans to same-sex married couples, which will increasingly shed stereotypes and misconceptions. The momentum from the bipartisan vote will further embolden conservatives to back marriage equality with their voices and wallets. New York has also placed the issue squarely within the mainstream, giving greater cover to court justices to rule in favor of marriage equality without fear of getting too far ahead of public opinion.

Finally, the decisive victory has led to increased media pressure on Barack Obama to stop “evolving” and start backing fairness and freedom.

There is still an enormous amount of work left to do. However, success in the Empire State means more people will witness the quality of our marriages, which inevitably will lead to greater marriage equality.

Jim  Newell has the video over at Gawker, but Pat’s losing it a little bit, doing that thing fundamentalists do when people laugh at them/win the culture wars that they started:  he’s making up crazy revenge porn fantasies about what his “god” is going to do to New York now.  Here’s the text of the thing:

I think we need to remember the term sodomy came from a town known as Sodom and Sodom was destroyed by God Almighty and the thing that they practiced was homosexual activity and even they tried to rape angels who came down there, so that’s the kind of people they were.

Okay, so even if we were to grant Pat Robertson’s contention that the Sodom thing actually happened, he’s essentially arguing our point here, as he is conceding that the big issue in that story was Angel Rape [actually inhospitality, which has a lot more complex meaning in that context than it does in most of our discourse.  Raping angels would naturally fall under the heading of being inhospitable, you see].  So unless you’re an idiot and you actually think that the average LGBT person is an angel rapist, then that story doesn’t have anything to do with gay people.

But beyond that, Jesus when He spoke of Sodom He didn’t say anything about the homosexuality he talked about just the fact that business was as usual until God decided to destroy it.

Because it wasn’t about homosexuality, genius.

And He sent an angel down there and He said to Lot and his family, ‘get out now because I’m gonna destroy this whole area.’ That’s where sodomy came from, we use the term sodomy and it means Sodom.

Yeah, well, fundies use lots of words incorrectly.

What’s it like? We’re heading that way as a nation. In history there’s never been a civilization ever in history that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity, traditional marriage, traditional child-rearing, and has survived. There isn’t one single civilization that has survived that openly embraced homosexuality. So you say, “what’s going to happen to America?” Well if history is any guide, the same thing’s going to happen to us.

Uh huh, okay, Pat. Time for your nap.

Through ABC Family and the Christian Broadcast Network, industrialist and Christian Right evangelist Pat Robertson (not his real name) has spent more than 30 years using Hollywood and the cable television industry to inject his social prejudices — and his failed threats of destruction against various cities — into North American households. Mind you, these are households that never asked their cable company to pollute their living rooms with his Christian cash-crazed telethons such as The 700 Club.

While Robertson used Hollywood domestically to preserve various social bigotries and to market himself as a kindly Christian gentleman, he also used his industrial empire to profit from forced labor in the diamond and gold trade in Liberia, and to support notorious African war criminal Charles Taylor.

Few Americans know about Robertson’s history of international human-rights abuses, because he has focused his television empire on other issues to distract public attention. Robertson doesn’t choose issues such as social violence, middle-class poverty, inaccurate news shows, or infidelity and divorce — issues that might enjoy broad public agreement, but which would hit too close to home among his viewers and donors.

Pat Robertson says the primary threat that America faces is from homosexuals who are using Hollywood to glamorize gay people’s rights and to pressure straight actors into accepting gay roles.

Homosexual Hollywood — it’s an alarming prospect, isn’t it? There’s just one problem: Straight actors are taking gay roles (for pay) because directors and casting agents refuse to hire openly gay actors!

The 1996 documentary The Celluloid Closet had no problem finding homophobia in Hollywood 15 years ago. If things have changed, tell that to all the openly homophobic celebrities that AfterElton found last month. Respected straight actor Colin Firth says he sees discrimination against gay actors and feels “complicit” for having accepted a gay role that could have been performed by a gay actor. Actor Rupert Everett has been outspoken about antigay discrimination in Hollywood, as has veteran actor Richard Chamberlain:

Homophobia is alive and well in Hollywood — and few should know that better than Robertson, who is a product of Hollywood conservatives’ glamorization of Christian Right war criminals and human-rights violators.

Hat tip: People for the American Way