Daft Claim: Gay people are pedophiles who want to recruit your sons

Yep, it’s Pat Robertson of course.

So here is how it plays out …

• A widow writes in concerned about her son who lives with her – no age is specified
• Apparently her son is in a gay relationship with another man who is married and so she asks for guidance on what to do.
• Mr Robertson immediately leaps in and labels the married guy as a gay pedophile, and so without knowing any details at all we have this automatic knee-jerk response
• He advises her to go to church and report this pedophile to the church elders. He also claims, on the basis of exactly zero evidence, that gay men recruit young boys into into homosexuality

Robertson: “There’s so many young people, impressionable, some coach comes after them, some adult comes after them, some older sibling comes after them, and they somehow think, ‘Because they did this I must be gay.”

Here it all is …

I can’t help but wonder how real any of this is, I can see at least three distinct possibilities here …

1. Pat Robertson has a reputation, so I can indeed envisage people writing in with specific assertions that are designed to hit one of his hot buttons and set him off.
2. This is TV, and so often a lot of scripting takes place. He may have wished to sound off on gay rights, and so ‘viewer’ questions such as this may have been planted
3. It could also be a real scenario

What is also interesting here is that this absurd rant is exactly what we expect from Mr Robertson, this is not an exception to his norm, nor is it even shocking, but rather this is exactly the norm we expect from him.

One other important observation – if indeed Mr Robertson assumes (incorrectly for no reason) that this is a middle-aged guy hitting on some young underage kid, then why oh why is he telling her to go see the “church elders”, what exactly qualifies them to deal with such an issue. If he truly believed this is indeed pedophelia, then his guidance should be to advise her to immediately phone the police – anything else invites a cover-up.

As for the concept of recruiting “impressionable youth”, no gay people don’t do that, but that is exactly what religious people do. They run tent crusades, youth camps, go into schools, and run youth clubs, all designed to target the 4-14 age group.

So in the end, if your irony meter has not yet been completely blown to bits, we should also observe that Mr Robertson is the guy who claims Christians are persecuted, yet in reality is actually the guy who is consistently whipping up a a frenzy of hatred and persecution that specifically targets people for the crime of being born gay.