Opinion | Pat Robertson dies, National Sex Day lives on

Happy Friday!

Today, June 9, is National Sex Day. It’s a day when we’re supposed to celebrate sex, love, connection, fun, pleasure — all the good things in life.

We should live in a society in which we can have open and frank discussions about sex, sexuality, gender expression and connection. But our discourse is dominated by right-wing efforts to limit discussions of sex and sexuality in schools, attack drag queens, and create dangerous panic about trans kids and their place in schools and sports. America has long been a puritanical country — influenced by conservative Christian views about gender roles and abstinence from sex outside the context of marriage and procreation — so none of these struggles are new.

At the same time, perhaps National Sex Day is a reminder that free love has had its movement leaders, too, long before the 1960s hippie era. I read this week about Victoria Woodhull, who in the 1870s was the first woman to run for president and was an activist who believed the government should stay out of people’s romantic and sexual lives. She married three times and challenged the idea that men could carry on affairs and basically do whatever the heck they wanted while women could not.

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In 1871, Woodhull delivered a famous address, “And the Truth Shall Make You Free: A Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom.” Here’s a quote worth meditating on:

“Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing less!”

I love that, for isn’t this what true social freedom means? This leads me to another man who, for many of us, represented the opposite of love and freedom.

Remembering Pat Robertson’s hatreds

I know we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. But how else are we to speak of the deeds of powerful people who used their enormous platforms to spread hatred and condemnation every night, for money?

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I’ve written about how I grew up immersed in evangelical culture in Texas in the 1990s. Part of that culture was watching our parents watch televangelists on TV pretty much every day and night. The cast of prosperity-gospel characters I recall being on frequently were Kenneth Copeland, John Hagee and Benny Hinn. But probably the most influential of them all was Pat Robertson of “The 700 Club,” who died Thursday at the age of 93.

He regularly attacked feminism and gay people:

"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians"

- the late, not great Pat Robertson

And he did so much more harm than that.

It was in the early 2000s that I became aware enough to start processing the disasters happening in and around America. At the time, televangelists and preachers had outsize influence in explaining that horrible events were God’s way of punishing us. Robertson’s specialty was painting God as a punitive being who would smack us in the face anytime the United States started looking a little too Sodom-and-Gomorrah-y.

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He and Jerry Falwell said at the time that God let 9/11 happen because the United States was getting too free for its own good.

“I really believe,” Falwell said, “that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

Robertson agreed: “I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government.”

Greg Sargent: How Pat Robertson created today’s Christian nationalist GOP

In 2005, after New Orleans was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, Robertson suggested the disaster was connected to abortion: “I was reading … a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood. … Have we 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? Could they be connected?”

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And in 2010, when Haiti was devastated by an earthquake, Robertson said that Haitians — whose ancestors had defeated the French in 1804, creating the first Black nation to declare independence from its colonizers — were to blame because their ancestors had “swore a pact to the devil” for their freedom.

Programs like “The 700 Club” have had immense sway over our culture and information ecosystem — something mainstream journalists often don’t seem to acknowledge or understand. “The 700 Club,” which airs every weekday, is one of the longest-running shows in broadcast history; the Christian Broadcasting Network, which produces the show, says it can be seen in 96 percent of U.S. homes. Robertson and the show’s other guests and hosts provided spiritual commentary on news events, and viewers could call the prayer hotline, offer testimonies and, of course, send pledges and donations to support the network.

Is it really such a surprise that after decades of evangelicals blaming abortion for America’s natural disasters, antiabortion efforts prevailed last year with the overturn of Roe v. Wade? Or that now, we are seeing such a fervor against trans and LGBTQ rights? This is part of the dark legacy of Robertson, whom it’s fair to call out for helping to stoke the climate of hatred we see now. To intentionally blame people for their own suffering? I can’t think of anything crueller or more devilish than that.

Talking Black superheroines and princesses

This week, I put out a column about the fuss over the new Black Ariel in Disney’s remake of “The Little Mermaid.”

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On Twitter, I had asked a question: Could White people name a fictional Black superheroine or princess they looked up to as a kid, besides Storm from X-Men?

Re: the discourse over Halle Bailey as Ariel:

I'd lose count of all the fictional white female superheroines and princesses that I idolized as a kid.

Can white people name one major Black woman/girl superheroine* or princess that they idolized?

(And not Storm from X-Men)

The responses flowed in over several days, and the discourse took some surprising twists and turns. As I ultimately wrote: “Representation is not enough. Inspiration, dedication to and normalization of empowered Black women — that’s where the true magic lies.” I hope you’ll read and let me know what you think.

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