Amanda Marcotte: 10 Craziest Things Pat Robertson Has Said!

It's tempting to dismiss Pat Robertson as an unimportant distraction, a living relic whose various kooky opinions might have mattered in the past, but don't matter any longer. That would be a mistake. While many other Christian right leaders have crowded the field in recent years, Robertson still has wide reaching influence through his popular televangelism program "The 700 Club." The show not only airs on Robertson's own Christian Broadcasting Network, but also the supposedly mainstream ABC Family Channel. Nor has Robertson really faded from the world of right wing activism. The university he founded, Regent, continues to crank out hard right politicians and bureaucrats, including Bob McDonnell, the governor of Virginia. The Robertson founded American Center for Law and Justice, which is meant to be a Christian right counterpoint to the ACLU, continues to strike huge blows to human rights in the courts, with a specific eye to dismantling religious freedom, and forcing fundamentalist Christian views on the rest of the country. While all this goes on, Pat Robertson continues to be as loony as ever, using his position as the host of The 700 Club to spout all sorts of silly, bizarre and horrific ideas to his rapt audience, who believes the man has a special relationship with God. His profile in the mainstream media, may have faded in recent years, but his influence over the Christian right, and therefore the Republican Party, doesn't seem to have dimmed much at all. With that in mind, here are 10 of his most recent alarming and disturbing statements. 1) Men with rebellious wives should live where wife beating is legal. When a caller complained, that his wife insults him, and once raised a hand to him, Robertson lamented the end of wife beating: I don't think we condone wife beating these days, but something has got to be done, he whined. After characterizing the wife, as someone who does not understand authority, he jokingly recommended that the husband move to Saudi Arabia, so that he can legally batter her. 2) You should cast demons out of second hand clothes you buy, lest their previous owner's evil infect you. After a 700 Club viewer asked if her mother was right to believe that clothes bought at a resale shop might have demons hiding in them, Robertson recommended praying over them as a precautionary measure. Hey, it ain't going to hurt anything to rebuke any spirits that happened to have attached themselves to those clothes, he said, adding that witches may have cursed the second hand clothes.