Why Pat Robertson's AIDS-Origin Theory Is So Dangerous

Yesterday, introducing a segment where an HIV-positive woman's immune system "miraculously" recovered after she was given a new antiretroviral therapy ("she believes the treatment was an answer to prayer"), Pat Robertson very matter-of-factly informed his audience that AIDS originated when the World Health Organization was experimenting in Africa on a monkey virus with…polio vaccine given to humans?  Oh, screw it, here's the quote:

“AIDS.  Where did it come from?  Well, I can gather, it came from Africa.  I think the World Health Organization was doing some experiments in the Congo on a monkey virus, a monkey injection to fight polio.  And it wasn’t an injection, they put it in sugar cubes and they gave it to these Africans, a couple hundred thousand in the test.  And this is the first time when monkey diseases crossed into the human condition.”

The theory—that HIV was caused by a polio vaccine developed in infected monkey tissue cultures and administered to Africans in the 1950s—originates in a 1992 article in Rolling Stone magazine and a subsequent 1999 book (by another journalist), The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, both of which have been thoroughly discredited in the intervening years.   (You can find a concise history of the debunking of this theory at Right Wing Watch or The College of Physicians of Philadelphia's History of Vaccines project.)

It's curious that Pat put the blame on the World Health Organization.  The Rolling Stone article specifically points out that WHO denied sanctioning the vaccine trials, by all accounts conducted by a private researcher, Hilary Koprowski, who invented the first live polio vaccine.  But then, it's easy to imagine Robertson being quick to incriminate a United Nations affiliate, what with a lifetime of UNphobia under his belt (one-world government!).

But WHO does come into the picture in that they are presently working to eradicate polio in Africa with oral polio vaccine.  And one of the problems WHO faces in Africa is local suspicion of the vaccine, unfounded yet widely regarded fears that the vaccine is a Western plot to spread sterility—or the HIV virus.  As a result, several Nigerian states ban the polio vaccine outright; in February, gunmen shot up two polio clinics in the Nigerian state of Kano, killing 10 clinic workers.  Consequently, more than half of last year's worldwide documented polio cases were found in Nigeria, and 17 African countries that had previously been declared polio-free have seen the polio virus re-emerge.

If you think Pat Robertson's blathering this discredited AIDS theory half a world away in the United States won't have any effect on rumormongering in Africa, you might want to think again.  The 700 Club airs in 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, with extensive broadcasts in Nigeria.  And are they proud of their African reach:

Admittedly, the African broadcasts of The 700 Club are a 30-minute digest rather than the 1-hour version broadcast in the United States (in some places every week, some places everyday).  But ultimately, it's Robertson's own Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) that decides what airs in Africa.  Do you trust them not to broadcast Pat Robertson's lies, spread unwarranted fears, and allow hundreds more to contract polio?

Or will Pat Robertson be the next Jenny McCarthy?

Pat Robertson Thinks $90 Is "Big Money" for Welfare Recipients, But $100 Is "Not Worth a Whole Lot" to His Viewers

Former 700 Club co-host Ben Kinchlow (who has a regular column at WorldNetDaily, so that probably tells you something about him) returned to his old stomping grounds last week to promote his new book, Black Yellow-Dogs, where he actually calls the 88% of African-Americans who routinely vote Democratic "house slaves."  (Except it's not a new book, just a new version of the same book he wrote in 2008 and he was on The 700 Club to promote it back then, too.  Curiously, the fact that an African-American was about to be nominated by the Democratic Party at the time goes completely unmentioned.)

I could bother to dissect Kinchlow's petulance about how the African-American community is really socially conservative and if only that 88% could see things clearly, they'd recognize that they agree with the Republican Party on principle, but that chestnut's been going around for 25-30 years, at least.  I could also dissect Kinchlow's equally tired but recently resurgent bit about how a family can make more on welfare benefits than people holding a job, but that one, most recently repeated in a  Cato Institute study [PDF file], has already been discredited elsewhere, like Bill Moyers & Company, or this other blog which I admit I only found while looking into the study's accuracy.

Instead, let's focus on something Pat Robertson says in the middle of Kinchlow's welfare presentation (about 2:40 into the video):

KINCHLOW: "The reason that 70-some-odd-percent of African-American babies are born out of wedlock is because they reward mothers for having children out of wedlock."
ROBERTSON: "That's right.  Big, big reward.  I mean, about 90 bucks a month a child, or something—whatever they pay you, it's big, big money."

Big money!  Three dollars a day to feed, clothe, and diaper a growing child.  And it's not even accurate.  Ninety dollars was the standard addition for a new child under the OLD welfare system, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, before Clinton signed welfare reform into law.  Today, welfare, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, is distributed through the states, and half of the states impose a family cap that prevents families from getting more money for an additional child.  In most of the other half, the benefit increase is usually a percentage increase from the previous benefit, as opposed to a set dollar amount.  Also, TANF has a lifetime time-limit of five years, so the whole concept of welfare as a permanent way of life is out of date.

But to make this extra special, here's Pat Robertson in 1997 telling his viewers that $100—which in today's dollars is actually $146—is "not worth a whole lot":

You can spend $100 in a hurry.  But if you subtract 10 dollars, you can live large.

Pat Robertson Prays for the Republican Congressional Leadership, Omits President Clinton (Jan. 10, 1995)

Here's Pat making no secret about how much he's in the tank for the Republican Party, as only they are "trying to do something for this nation."  Co-host Ben Kinchlow had to remind Pat to pray for the President, too.  You can tell that he doesn't really want to.

Pat Robertson's Advice to the Unemployed: "Ask God. Or Consider Telemarketing." (Oct. 1, 2013)

Pat Robertson thinks there are 90 million Americans out of work, which I guess is true if you're counting children as "unemployed."  (Damn freeloaders!)  Last week, one of those 90 million 11.3 million wrote in to ask Pat if it would be a sin to work in a local casino that's hiring.  Pat's response?

“Get another job.  There have to be—ask God to open a job for you… I'm a great believer in these telemarketing things, you can get work from home, you can do all kinds of things.”

Ask God.  What a great idea!  I'm sure that none of the millions of other people looking for work—and remember, Pat thinks there are 90 million of them—even thought to pray for a job.  Oh, you'll be the first!  The rest of the unemployed probably aren't Christian, anyway.  I mean, if they were, they'd be praying to God for jobs too, right?

But hey, there's always telemarketing—because what the world needs is even more people calling us up to sell us stuff.  Anyway, there's plenty of work out there besides that sinful casino job.  The rest of the 90 million are just lazy bums.

The Jet Stream is Just God Pushing You Along Faster (May 8, 1997)

Hey, remember that Saturday Night Live sketch where Tina Fey and Amy Poehler played Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, and Fey/Palin said that global warming is "just God hugging us closer"?  Ha!  Parody. We laugh because it's not real!  What's that, Pat Robertson?

“Put God's laws to work for you!…If I can get a jet airplane up into the jet stream going from west to east, the law of God works for me, and I start going about 100 miles an hour faster.  I was in a plane coming back from someplace on the West Coast…it was real slow going out, but coming back, we got in the jet stream, and it was about 100 miles an hour of extra speed! Because God's law was carrying us along!”

God pushes you faster when you fly from the west to the east, but he's a real sonofabitch if you fly in the other direction.  Maybe he's afraid we'll find out that if you fly east-to-west fast enough, you can in fact stop the earth's rotation, reverse it, and turn back time.  But how else could we save Lois Lane from the earthquake?  She has to live!  If only for the sequels!

Pat Robertson Admires Justice Scalia…Even If He IS Catholic (Sept. 9, 2013)

You might not have seen this relatively minor story where Republican superhero Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave a talk at a Houston theological institute on whether capitalism or socialism was more conducive to Christian values.  What a not-loaded question!  What a random person to answer that question!  Scalia's answer (from the Houston Chronicle):

“The cardinal sin of capitalism is greed, but the cardinal sin of socialism is power. I'm not sure there's a clear choice between those evils.  While I would not argue that capitalism as an economic system is inherently more Christian than socialism…it does seem to me that capitalism is more dependent on Christianity than socialism is. For in order for capitalism to work—in order for it to produce a good and a stable society—the traditional Christian virtues are essential.”

And of course what could be construed as a semi-official endorsement of Christianity gets picked up by CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) News, because The 700 Club's newscast mostly cherry-picks items that either further their agenda (Obama is bad! Republicans are fighting the good fight! Christianity is the bestest!) or illustrate how America is losing its moral compass (anything gay homosexual, anything abortion, anything that keeps anyone from praying or advancing Christianity anywhere, even if it's a public institution doing the promoting because damn it, we're a Christian nation and what happened to that?).

Um…where was I?  Oh right, Scalia likes Christianity.  And Pat Robertson likes Scalia!  Mostly:

“He's a terrific guy, a very charming man, and very, very, very intelligent, and he's right.  You don't have capitalism without the Protestant ethic, without…the idea that before God, you're able to fulfill your destiny, and it's that ethic that's lifted people up out of slavery, poverty, and he's right.  Scalia, by the way, is a dedicated Catholic.  I don't know what that means, but he's a good man.”

Wow.  Pat could have just stopped after his Cliffs Notes edition of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and it would have been fine, more or less.  (Is his analysis of Weber correct?  Did I read Weber in college?  I don't remember.  Hey, this isn't a sociology blog!)  But he just couldn't let that Catholic thing go, could he?  That "I don't know what that means" at the end?  What he's really saying is, "Protestantism is responsible for capitalism, but Scalia's Catholic, so I don't know exactly where his admiration for capitalism comes from."  But hey! He may be Catholic, but he's still a good guy!

It's not apparent just from watching the on-air 700 Club program, but hostility to Catholicism has historically been pervasive behind the scenes at CBN—and given that CBN is Pat Robertson's ministry and is completely dominated by him, it's difficult to believe that that sort of prevalent hostility operated independent of Robertson's influence. Robert Boston, in The Most Dangerous Man in America?: Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition recounts this incident:

“In 1986, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights…complained to Robertson after one of its members protested anti-Catholic bias at a Houston office of The 700 Club.  The Catholic League member was a volunteer at CBN and alleged that telephone counselors were making anti-Catholic comments to callers.  Reportedly, Catholic callers were told that their church is the 'Whore of Babylon' and were urged to 'come out of her' to be saved.  When the Catholic League volunteer complained about the matter, he was told his services were no longer needed at CBN.”

Then there's what former CBN producer Gerard Straub (1978-80) had to say in his insider account, Salvation for Sale:

“The fundamentalists I worked with at CBN vehemently attacked the satanic Catholic church's belief that the saints could help in a person's healing… They think that if a Catholic prayed to a saint for healing, Satan would heal the person because it would be to his advantage to deceive the person into thinking that the healing was the result of their prayers to the saint.  The Bible never mentions anything about praying to saints.  The fundamentalists believe that Satan uses the church teaching about saints to trick people into not finding God and into following unbiblical teachings.”

Uh-oh.  Scalia believes in the saints.  Oh, well.  Such a nice man.  Too bad he's going to Hell.

Gordon Robertson's on the Paula Deen Comeback Bandwagon

This aired TODAY.  I'm current!

Remember Paula Deen and that whole thing?  With the racism, and the N-word, and the dream plantation wedding complete with tap-dancing N-words?  Of course you do, because you are on the Internet, and if you were on the Internet in June, you could not escape the Paula Deen deposition and the tearful, questionably sincere apologies and the firings from all her endorsements and everything because now her brand stunk like babyback ribs that had been left too long on the griddle.  (Is that even remotely correct?  I don't know anything about Southern cooking.)

Anyway, last month Paula Deen started her comeback, because it really only takes less than three months for people to forget all the racism and resume eating her sugar-flavored butter or butter-flavored sugar or whatever it was she was famous for making.  And here's Gordon Robertson, Pat's son and heir to the throne, helping her along by choosing her as the inspirational story for a viewer who wants to know if she should follow her dream even though she can't afford to:

“Here's a story for you.  There was a single mom with two kids, and she got the idea to follow her dream.  And so she said, 'I want to cook, I want to be known as a cook.'  And so she created a lunch service for the business district where she would hand-deliver home-cooked meals to offices in the downtown area.  Well, it turned into a thriving business, turned into a huge success, and that lady's name is Paula Deen.  So follow your dream, even when it seems that there's no dream left.”

 Follow your dream!  Except maybe not the one with the tap-dancing minstrel wedding.