Pat Robertson went on another anti-gay diatribe on “The 700 Club” today, telling viewers that “this onslaught of homosexual behavior that is being forced on us by the Supreme Court of the United States is having deadly consequences.”
He was discussing a case out of Idaho where ministers working for a for-profit business and represented by the Religious Right group Alliance Defending Freedom are challenging a non-discrimination ordinance in the city of Coeur d’Alene.
The Hitching Post Wedding Chapel until recently said that it offered services to marry couples “using a traditional or civil ceremony,” and said that while its staff are Christian ministers, the business could “also perform wedding ceremonies of other faiths as well as civil weddings.” As blogger Jeremy Hooper noted, the chapel recently edited its website and “changed the text so that all the mentions of civil weddings no longer appear.”
Robertson called on the business to “leave Idaho” and “get out of that state and if need be close that chapel down,” predicting that soon churches will be “forced to perform a gay marriage.” He also told a story in which he claimed that Cardinal O’Connor, the late archbishop of New York, once threatened to shut down Georgetown University, which is in Washington, D.C., over government pressure to “provide money, resources to support a gay club in the student body.”
“I would close the school down,” Robertson recalled O’Connor saying. “I think those guys in Idaho had better get out and dodge now before it gets any worse.”
