Pat Robertson, known for LGBT hate speech and a certain disgusting statement about the Orlando Pulse shootings, is dead

Pat Robertson, the Baptist minister who transformed American Christianity into a political machine, has died. He was 93.

He was not from Orlando, so this post might not seem like something in our ambit. He died last Thursday, so it isn't the most timely post, either. But we've had an internal debate over whether it's worth ignoring his death — because good riddance — or noting it in an Orlando publication because of one of the things he said about Orlando while he was alive.

Robertson said many inflammatory things in his long life as an architect of the far right — after the 9/11 attacks, he said Americans' sins were the cause; in a Christian Coalition fundraising letter, he said feminism "encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians"; on The 700 Club, his TV show in which he conned the poor into sending him money he didn't need, he said homosexuality was a “pathology” and claimed that “many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals. ... Those two things seem to go together.”

The New Republic covered his lifetime of wild statements more thoroughly than we will here: "A Compendium of Statements That St. Peter Might Be Asking Pat Robertson to Explain."

The reason we're bothering is among Robertson's many disgusting statements was a particularly odious comment about the Pulse shootings.

Discussing the mass shooting that left 49 dead and 53 seriously injured on his daily 700 Cashgrab, he said that conservatives' best political move would be to simply stand aside and allow the left's efforts to encourage both Islamic tolerance and LGBT equality to cancel each other out. “The left is having a dilemma of major proportions and I think for those of us who disagree with some of their policies, the best thing to do is to sit on the sidelines and let them kill themselves,” Robertson said.

Now, your drunk uncle (or some of our facebook commenters) will try to tell you this never happened, that Robertson's Pulse statements were a hoax. It's true that there was a hoax along these lines just days before, when a satire site published this:

“I don’t even need to tell you what all of this means,” Robertson said, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “This is how God is punishing us for the shameful SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage, a catastrophic piece of legislature that I have so vigorously attempted to shoot down.

Fake news, but plausible enough that it was widely alleged on social media and at least one newspaper reported it as fact. So tell Drunk Uncle to check Snopes to confirm that an actual, so-called "Christian faith leader" advocated — gave his blessing, if you will — the death of untold numbers of human beings.

And he used the death of 49 Orlandoans as an excuse for that hateful rhetoric.

It's just a coincidence he died so close to the seven-year anniversary of the Pulse shootings, but it does make the memory of that statement more of an affront to common decency.

David John Marley, the author of a 2007 biography of Robertson, wrote that his outrageous statements were calculated to arouse his core following: Christians who felt ignored or mistreated by elites. We've all seen where that leads. And we have Robertson, in large part, to thank for it. Rest in pieces, sir.