Today in "Disgusting People"

I generally try to ignore Pat Robertson. In my opinion, the man is senile and should be under 24-hour supervision, lest he hurt himself. This, however, is too much to pass on.

Octogenarian televangelist and multi-millionaire Pat Robertson has cooked up what might possibly become one of his most vile anti-gay attacks yet. On his “700 Club” show today, Robertson claimed that gay people in San Francisco have special rings infected with HIV that they use to cut unsuspecting people to intentionally infect them. A web search for this phenomenon found nothing, nor did Robertson offer any proof.

“You know what they do in San Francisco, some in the gay community there they want to get people so if they got the stuff they’ll have a ring, you shake hands, and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger,” Robertson told his co-host, Terry Meeuwsen. “Really. It’s that kind of vicious stuff, which would be the equivalent of murder.”

. . . .

“There are laws now,” Robertson lamented, “I think the homosexual community has put these draconian laws on the books that prohibit people from discussing this particular affliction, you can tell somebody you had a heart attack, you can tell them they’ve got high blood pressure, but you can’t tell anybody you’ve got AIDS,” he continued.”

Needless to say, the "ring" fantasy is a flat-out lie. I'm not even going to grace it with the possibility of being just an urban legend that Robertson's repeating. There's malice aforethought in this.

And the part about "laws . . . that prohibit people from discussing" AIDS is laughable. We spent more than two decades trying to get people to talk about AIDS. And now we've passed "draconian laws" to forbid that?

Well, the reaction to Robertson's little dark fantasy has been pretty negative. What did anyone expect? So true to form, CBN has forced YouTube to pull the original video (and there's a full run-down on that aspect at Right Wing Watch), and then Robertson came back with an "explanation." (I'm not going to call it an apology, because it's not.) Joe Jervis contacted CBN directly and got this response:

I was asked by a viewer whether she had a right to leave her church because she had been asked to transport an elderly man who had AIDS and about whose condition she had not been informed. My advice was that the risk of contagion in those circumstances was quite low and that she should continue to attend the church and not worry about the incident.

In my own experience, our organization sponsored a meeting years ago in San Francisco where trained security officers warned me about shaking hands because, in those days, certain AIDS-infected activists were deliberately trying to infect people like me by virtue of rings which would cut fingers and transfer blood.

I regret that my remarks had been misunderstood, but this often happens because people do not listen to the context of remarks which are being said. In no wise (sic) were my remarks meant as an indictment of the homosexual community or, for that fact, to those infected with this dreadful disease.

If you want the context of the remarks, Huffington Post has included the video in their own report on this incident. (I'd embed it, but it screws up the formatting for some reason.)

But, to his "clarification." First off, everything Robertson has ever said about gays is meant as an indictment of the community. He's probably one of the most reprehensible of the Liars for Jesus (TM), simply because he is in such loose contact with reality. That said, no one misunderstood his remarks. The fact that his own staff saw fit to edit them from the published video speaks to that. As for the warning about shaking hands, if the incident he relates was in the early years of the epidemic, I can see that, since no one knew much about transmission -- at least, not the general public. The ring part is pure bullshit. (Although with the right wing, you never can tell if it's a deliberate lie or "received wisdom.")

And just a comment about the mindset of the people who compose Robertson's followers: This woman had to ask if she had the right to leave her church? WTF?

I think that explains a lot right there.

Hat tip to Alvin McEwen at Justice for All.