Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Hurricane Pat petered out in the Pacific in 1982, but the landlocked blowhard wheezes on


God’s weatherman, Pat Robertson, is at it again.

The 88-year-old has commanded Hurricane Florence to stand down. The Hill reports that yesterday, he tottered into a TV studio to admonish the storm:

“In the name of Jesus, you Hurricane Florence, we speak to you in the name of Jesus, and we command the storm to cease its forward motion and go harmlessly into the Atlantic,” Robertson said.

“Go up north away from land and veer off in the name of Jesus. We declare in the name of the lord that you shall go no farther, you shall do no damage in this area,” the evangelical leader continued.

“He went on to declare a “shield of protection” over parts where “innocent people” are bracing for the hurricane, which is already reportedly packing winds of up to 140 mph, according to CNN.

“In Jesus’ holy name, be out to sea!” Robertson continued.

“He also said that the “shield” has worked in the against previous hurricanes.

“It’s almost hilarious to see them try,” he said. “They try to get in and they can’t, and then they go north and they turn around, try to come back in. They can’t do it.”

Robertson’s announcement is the latest example of vainglory and decline (at 76, he claimed a God-inspired protein shake enabled him to leg-press one ton of weight) in the failed GOP presidential candidate.

On the June 8, 1998, edition of his show, he denounced Orlando, Florida and Disney World for allowing a privately sponsored "Gay Days" weekend, declaring that the acceptance of homosexuality could result in hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, terrorist bombings and "possibly a meteor.”

The resulting outcry prompted Robertson to return to the topic on June 24, where he quoted the Book of Revelation to support his claims.

The first hurricane of the 1998 Atlantic hurricane season, Hurricane Bonnie, actually turned away from Florida and instead damaged the rest of the East Coast. The area hardest hit by the hurricane was the Hampton Roads region, which includes Virginia Beach, home of Robertson’s TV empire and christianist recreation of a madrasa, Regent University (Robertson, with health-food evangelist Jerry Falwell, also blamed gays, lesbians, pro-choice activists, and “perversity” for the 6.7 magnitude earth that hit the San Fernando Valley in 1994, causing around $25 billion in damage and 72 deaths, and the 9/11 attacks on The Gays, too).

TV preachers pretty much agree LGBT Americans have a connection to severe weather but tend to fall out over the details. Last year, death-to-gays Pastor Kevin Swanson said the path of Hurricane Irma would be altered by God if the Supreme Court quickly made abortion and gay marriage illegal, "before Irma does her damage," as Right Wing Watch noted (he also claimed Harvey was due to Houston electing an out lesbian, Annise Parker, as mayor; the fact that Parker had already left office last year didn’t seem to matter. God has a long memory).

He also blamed Harvey on Texas’ failure to pass a bathroom bill, saying “Jesus sends the message home, unless Americans repent, unless Houston repents…they will all likewise perish.”.

Radio preacher Rick Wiles, likewise, said Houston is underwater because it "boasted of its LGBT devotion."

Pat Robertson had nothing to say about last fall’s one-two punch from the cloud-whispering gays.

The Carolinas have been punished before over their flaccid response to the presence of The Gays. Hurricane Matthew plastered the east coast from Florida up, causing widespread damage in North and South Carolina. Andrew Bieszad, a contributor to Shoebat.com, a popular anti-gay, Christian extremist website, explained that God is sent the hurricane as “a sign of His anger” against America for tolerating homosexuality (curiously, no one used God’s wrath as a reason not to repeal North Carolina’s spiteful antigay law, HB2, passed just a few months before the 2016 hurricane season began).

Family Research Council honcho and Louisiana Baptist minister Tony Perkins struck out in the 2015 hurricane season. He pinpointed the devastation that occurred in Hawaii after Hurricane Joaquin in 2015 as an example, saying it was punishment for marriage equality and abortion. He got the same warning from Messianic Jewish pastor Jonathan Cahn who told him that Hurricane Joaquin, which devastated Hawaii, was a "sign of God's wrath".

During the interview, Mr Cahn stated that the storm was a sign God was angry about the legalization of gay marriage and abortion and the relationship between the United Nations and Israel.

He's quoted as agreeing, adding "God is trying to send us a message".

Ironically, Perkins’ Louisiana home was destroyed by a flood in 2016. Perkins downplayed the significance of the smiting:

“This is a flood of near-biblical proportions," he said in an interview with the Family Research Council.
"We had to escape from our home Saturday by canoe. We had about 10 feet of water at the end of our driveway. Our house flooded, a few of our cars flooded."

Robertson hedged his bets explaining Katrina, suggesting that God withdrew some kind of special protection from the U.S. “Have we,” he asked at one point, “found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster?”

Dateline Hollywood promptly ran a satirical piece claiming that the evangelical leader had said that “Hurricane Katrina was God’s way of expressing [His] anger at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its selection of Ellen Degeneres to host this year’s Emmy Awards,” many took the story as gospel and cited it, rather than Robertson’s actual statements, as indicative of evangelical Christianity’s response to the disaster.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the Eastern seaboard in 2012, prompting British preacher John McTernan to say President Barack Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage was to blame. He also claimed both Obama and opponent Mitt Romney “are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda” and that “America is under political judgment and the church does not know it!”

In New York, where lower Manhattan was flooded out, one minister of a Black Protestant congregation in hard-hit Far Rockaway claimed that the storm was God’s way of demonstrating his power to the “rich” and “gay” elites of Manhattan. In another example, the pastor of a predominantly black Seventh-Day Adventist Church said that our increasingly erratic weather was a sign of “the last days,” urging his congregants that they should turn quickly to Jesus to help them endure the difficult times ahead.

American Family Association’s Buster Wilson, the general manager of their radio network, blamed Hurricane Isaac on the city of New Orleans for hosting Southern Decadence, the annual LGBT festival in 2012.

Pam Olsen, the founder of the Florida Prayer Network, believed that marriage equality and ordination of gay priests could lead to floods, fires, and tornadoes.

In 2005, Rev. Franklin Graham blamed Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans’ “orgies”; and Catholic priest Gerhard Wagner called Katrina “divine retribution” for New Orleans’ tolerance of homosexuality. Rev. John Hagee waddled out of his San Antonio megachurch to bleat the same message: Mr. Hagee said that the storm was God’s punishment for its sinful ways, a common trope among conservative evangelists. Those sins included a gay pride parade that was scheduled for the same day that Katrina made landfall.

“New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that,” Mr. Hagee said in an interview on NPR in 2006. “Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the City of New Orleans.”

Robertson’s witchcrafty spell to protect his property holdings has prompted one skeptic to tweet, “So if Florence pounds the Eastern Seaboard it’ll be the LGBTQs’ fault, I assume. So are they more powerful than Jesus, Pat Robertson?”

The comment underlines one of the more vexing challenges of being one of God’s self-appointed press secretaries: more often than not, they make God out to be a right bungler whose misses more than he hits when smitings are called for in the modern world.

Equally curiously, no in the GOP wondered about God’s mood when He sent a hurricane to Tampa, causing the foreshortening of their 2012 presidential nominating convention.


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