This week, thousands of Haitians will be the beneficiaries of Pat Robertson. In fact, long before the horrific earthquake struck on Tuesday, when many of the more fashionable humanitarians who always flock to every tragedy probably would have been hard-pressed to find the island of Hispaniola on a map, Robertson’s Operation Blessing was already hard at work, helping to address the centuries-old tragedy that is Haitian poverty. Many Haitian bellies have been filled in the past, and undoubtedly many more Haitians will live and be fed in the coming days, because of Robertson and his organization, which has given more than $500 million in aid to suffering people since it began in 1978.
Just a little thought worth bearing in mind about Robertson while watching this clip of his High Moral Majesty, Keith Olbermann, discuss damning him to hell:
Of course, Olbermann is also outraged by Rush Limbaugh (Olbermann is always outraged by Rush Limbaugh), but Rush’s deliberate tweaking of the left by using the words of their own party’s leader in the Senate doesn’t need any defense from me, nor does the irony of Olbermann attacking his political rival while people are still dying in Haiti need any further exploration.
Now make no mistake, what Pat Robertson said — or at least its implication, which was that Haiti’s troubles, including the devastating earthquake, can be traced back to an alleged “pact with the devil” — was offensive to just about everyone who heard it. In fact, a large percentage of the voices decrying Robertson over the last two days have come from other Christians which (note to so many moderate Muslims) is a perfectly appropriate response when a member of your own religious community says or does something particularly out-of-line. As much as the elitists and the media like to portray us Christians as thoughtless, mindless automatons marching in lock step to their own worst caricatures, there is actually a great deal of diversity in Christian theology, with two of the things Christians are most likely to agree upon being:
1) Jesus Christ is the risen Lord —
2) Pat Robertson is wrong.
Still, as much as I disagree with Mr. Robertson’s comment, and his theological positions generally, I disagree far more with the gross double-standard that the media employees any time a Christian is involved in a controversy. Fortunately for me, the media must have made their own pact with the devil because scarcely a day passed before the Good Lord gave us a case-study in this overt bias.
The other day, the has-been actor, Danny Glover, did a perfect left-wing impersonation of Pat Robertson, which is to say that he too suggested that the giant earthquake in Haiti was supernatural tit-for-tat for past sins. Quoth Glover:
“When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Hear for yourself:
Now, some might suggest that Mr. Glover is not invoking the supernatural at all, he is only blaming climate change, but they are wrong. While it is true that Glover said in the same interview that disasters could strike anywhere in the Caribbean because of global warming, there is hardly any widely accepted correlation between atmospheric temperatures and tectonic shifts in the Earth’s crust, and even if there is, how would creating a global government to regulate CO2 emissions one month ago have stopped this? No, Mr. Glover is not blaming global warming, he is specifically saying that the quake is cosmic justice for the political sin of not sacrificing our sovereignty and prosperity to our angry Earth mother. Ultimately, he is blaming America, since we are the ones who have angered her the most with our wealth creation, our invention of clean technologies, and our growing of more trees now than we had a hundred years ago, not to mention other egregious transgressions. Glover’s is as “religious” a statement as any made by Pat Robertson, and just as offensive.
Undoubtedly Keith Olbermann will now boldly rebuke Mr. Glover and suggest he has an empty soul and lives in a virtual hell. Right?
Of course not, because publicly expressing your religious beliefs is only a crime to leftists when Christians do it. Suggesting that Pandora might hate American pollution and capitalism so much that she took her revenge on the poor people of a completely different country, while calling on America to stop “extracting more from the pain of the Haitian people” (what can the richest nation in the history of the world possibly extract from the pain of the Haitian people, exactly?), and to answer the call of “other nations like Venezuela, Brazil and Cuba to accept “another kind of internationalism” is a far lesser crime than suggesting that the God of more than a billion people on this planet might not approve of a deal that many Haitians themselves believe was made by their forbears. Not to mention simultaneously calling on Americans to pray for and donate money for the relief of the Haitian people.
Still, neither the outrage Mr. Olbermann and so many of our media betters feel toward Christians (both those who agree with Pat Robertson, and those who, like me, believe his comments were inconsistent with the New Covenant, and thus wrong), nor the nuances of anti-Americanism, global communism, climate-change hysteria, or Gaia-worship, are being considered by the actual Haitian people themselves as they struggle for survival.
Chances are they are simply praying to Jesus for mercy, and with any luck, drinking clean water provided by Pat Robertson.
Let us all pray with them.