Pat Robertson must have been handed a memo entitled “Things that enrage Greg” prior to this interview, because I find pretty much every word of this interview completely fucking infuriating.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But, sir, you have described this in pretty — this whole battle in pretty apocalyptic terms. You’ve said that liberals are engaged in an all-out assault on Christianity, that Democrats will appoint judges who don’t share our Christian values and will dismantle Christian culture. And that the out-of-control judiciary — and this was in your last book, Courting Disaster — is the most serious threat America has faced in nearly 400 years of history, more serious than Al Qaeda, more serious than Nazi Germany and Japan, more serious than the Civil War?

ROBERTSON: George, I really believe that. I think they are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together. There is an assault on marriage. There’s an assault on human sexuality, as [U.S. Supreme Court] Judge [Antonin] Scalia said, they’ve taken sides in the culture war. And on top of that, if we have a democracy, the senate processes should be that we can elect representatives who will share our point of view and vote those things into law.¹

That’s a cute little phrase he uses there, “if we have a democracy”. Well, asshole, we don’t have a democracy. As this New
Yorker article makes clear, we have a republic.

If each of every state?s two senators is taken to represent half that state?s population, then the senate?s fifty-five Republicans represent 131 million people, while its forty-four Democrats represent 161 million. Looked at another way, the present senate is the product of three elections, those of 2000, 2002, and 2004. In those elections, the total vote for senate senatorial candidates, winning and losing, was 99.7 million; for Republicans it was 97.3 million. The forty-four-person senate senate minority, therefore, represents a two-million-plus popular majority?a circumstance that, unless acres trump people, is at variance with common-sense notions of democracy. So Democrats, as democrats, need not feel too terribly guilty about engaging in a spot of filibustering from time to time.

Considering that our republic disproportionately favors your side, I’d strongly advise Rev. Robertson to shut the hell up.

Unfortunately for me, he didn’t shut up :

STEPHANOPOULOS: So I take it then, the answer to the question is that you believe only Christians and Jews are qualified to serve in the federal judiciary?

ROBERTSON: I’m not sure I’d make such a broad sweeping statement. But I just feel that those who share the philosophy of the founders of this nation, who assent to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, who assent to the principles that underlie the Constitution.

Since Robertson seems to be such a huge fan of the founding fathers, especially Jefferson (who he quotes twice), let me add a couple of quotes from Thomas Jefferson that we can use to consider whether a judge “share[s] the philosophy of the founders of this nation”.

“Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.”

- Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”

- letter to Baron von Humboldt, 1813

That’s why we have a President instead of a Prime Minister. So, Rev. Robertson, you can quote the founding fathers all you want, but history shows that America was founded as a secular nation by reasoned men who were distrustful of people like you.

^{1 : The Media Matters transcript leaves out the part where he dismisses 9/11 as “a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings”. Gotta love that he’s as inaccurate as he is insensitive. Why does anyone listen to this dickhead?}