Pat Robertson Wouldn’t Adopt Foreign Children Because They Might Turn Out ‘Weird’

He’s doing these kids a favor by not adopting them and thus not subjecting them to his warped and hateful worldview.

Wow, the co-host had a valid opinion, and after hearing Pat’s bigoted view she just says, “that’s true”. No, it’s not true. Tell him he’s a racist bigot and stop blowing him off like he’s your crazy grandpa. He’s the crazy grandpa that just happens to have a tv show for all of the world to hear his bigoted views.

What I took from this:

“Don’t allow abortions, don’t condone contraception – these are all god’s children! Adoption is always a viable alternative! Someone will give them a home. I mean, not me, of course. Hell no. But yeah, someone else, I’m sure.”

Fuck Pat Robertson.  

Also, would have loved to have seen the co-hosts reaction/response. At the beginning of the video she seemed quite firmly on the woman’s side, so I’m sure she reacted to Pat’s drivel with a healthy dose of “wtf.” Or at least I hope so.

I would happily give Robertson Alzheimer’s if it meant restoring Terry Pratchett’s mind. Mr. Pratchett delights people with his satire; Robertson just seeks to harm the Other.

We don’t know that the 700 Club viewer he’s addressing is loving or awesome, unless there is more information that was not presented here.  She IS asking Pat Robertson for advice.

Only American White Heterosexual Christians are fully human.  Everyone else is broken, weird, perverted, etc.  But Robertson is still good enough to proselytize to them because in his mind that’s a charitable and noble act. 

To speak to the woman’s original question, I found the sentence “if they were my own biological children that came with child support” very telling. I suspect that the issue may be more financial than that of a “blended family” issue.

Oh man, that this heinous creature is still around. I first heard his name in 1986 when I read an interview with Frank Zappa. He said that he didn’t want a religous man in the White House or anywhere near the red button.

That was the time that I realized that religion is a scourge on the US. I live in Europe and it is really hard for me to comprehend that vile and nasty people like Pat have a voice and get to be on TV. In Europe they stand on street corners, spouting this nonsense to deaf ears and selling pens from a cup.

Zappa wrote a song dedicated to shit like this called Jesus thinks you’re a Jerk. It had the ominous line “What if Pat gets in the White House?” 25 years later Frank is dead, Pat is allowed to be antisocial on prime time tv, and people like him are very near to the White House and the red button. Now it’s a man who wears magic underpants who is up for the precidency. “What if Mitt gets in the White House?”

Here’s Frank’s final words in that song; who would think they were relevant today?

“What if Mitt gets in the White House?
Now, wouldn’t that sort of qualify as an American Tragedy?
Especially if they cover it up, sayin’ ‘Jesus told it to me’
I hope we never see that day in The Land of The Free”

This made me so angry! He’s kind of right, though, I think, when someone already has children, getting together with someone who might be put off for whatever reason, even the same reasons Pat Robertson says! I don’t think the reasons are so off-base, even if I also think it’s wrong. I think it’s wrong to suggest there’s automatically something wrong, that you are taking on someone else’s problems, but some kids from some countries are known to have emotional problems, and it is better, I THINK, for someone to admit they don’t want to get into it, especially if they are weak, than give an effort and not be up for it. People have those same reasons for not wanting to be with a partner who knows the other parent of their children, and you wouldn’t want to force that kind of person to be with you!

My feelings are someone who is Christian asking for advice from Pat Robertson with these kind of problems, it is an adequate excuse he’s giving, it’s normal, it’s not good, but it’s someone telling you why these men aren’t staying interested for probable reasons they aren’t staying interested – is it wrong to tell someone that?

I’m also a woman who has been involved with two mentally ill men. The first one had a pyschotic break after we lived together, and I still tried to make it work. The second one was bipolar and told me on the second date, and at the time, I assumed that was being medicated adequately; I did not want to take care of a patient, but I ended up taking care of a patient, and it did not end well. It’s wrong to suggest these children automatically have problems, but it’s an adequate explanation why the men did not want to stick around to raise them. It’s not good, but was Pat Robertson dishonest in a plausible explanation why these men did not want to stick around? He did make it sound like it was the woman’s fault for adopting orphans (I don’t know that they’re technically orphans) and expecting good Christian men (if those were the fish in her pond) to put their money where their mouth is. Children who are born and need parenting – that’s where it really makes me angry, that he is excusing them for wanting their own non-weird children. But if I had met a guy who went cold over that fact, I would also not particularly despair that they were in the wrong. What is she supposed to do now? He doesn’t offer advice for that, and it’s kind of too late. I would not want to be with a man who was not into the whole package and was scared easily. It will probably be difficult, as wrong as that is, for her to find someone to go down that road she’s already on. It’s just very specific, and I think too nerve-wracking for the men she wanted to date so far.

If most of you may have a partner already, how many of you sincerely want to adopt some child from a foreign country and how many of your partners are completely with you 100%?

I hate to say it, but he has a point. I think that much of the anger in this thread is because people know that Pat’s right about why the men are leaving, and they want to change that fact through sheer force of will. It’s all well and good to declare that people should be generous and selfless, but a relationships are tough enough at the best of times; every day people dump/reject other people for far less reason than this. What’s more, there are some things that are just red flags for general freakiness, and a single woman, with not one, but three kids adopted from overseas? I’m sorry, but that rates an “Angelina Jolie” on the freak scale. 

Here’s my advice to the lady “If they don’t want your kids, you don’t want them”  I don’t get women who think that they NEED a man anyway.  I lived with a man for 4 years and things were just dandy until my daughter turned 13 and started turning into the typical teenage girl.  He said “We are great but I’m not going to deal with your daughter anymore.  I will just act like she’s not here”  I told him to get the fuck out of my house.  Up front I tell the men I date “My daughter comes first”  Though now that she’s grown and out the house it’s all for me lol

And my nephew is adopted from Russia and I love that little bugger 😛  Robertson needs a smack in the face a few times

 My wife are in the process of adopting a special needs child from China.  As a child, many of my friends were adopted, as well as my first cousin.  I knew that when the time came for me to start a family, adoption would be my first choice.  Before we got married we had lengthy discussions on what it means to have children and what methods we would ultimately choose.  For me, there was no hesitation to choose adoption as our first choice in starting a family.  For my wife, she felt the same way.  With millions of children in need of love and good homes, it was a no brainer. 

 Actually, Pat’s being pretty consistent here. While I think he’s wrong about abortion in general, he’s certainly correct that a baby put up for adoption in the USA can expect to be quickly adopted by loving parents. You seem to be suggesting that in pointing out this demand, he should necessarily applaud any and all adoptive parents, but that’s never been his shtick. For starters, we’re talking about a single woman, and we all know that Pat doesn’t believe that children should exist outside of a heterosexual marriage. Secondly, if you look at the baggage he’s describing, he’s clearly talking about older children, as overseas adoptions often are. That means that no abortion was averted by the child being put up for adoption. Again a standard right-wing line in the sand: life begins at conception but ends at birth. Thirdly, this is his standard treatment of any foreign issue: foreign suffering exists so that American Christians have somewhere to go for their mission trips.

As an aside, I am deeply uncomfortable with the whole concept of overseas adoption. Too many of these kids aren’t orphans, but rather children of parents who can’t afford them (cf Madonna’s adoption). It feels like we’ve created a situation where these people are struggling to make ends meet and then we buy their children from them. Doesn’t feel right to me.

Healthy white American babies might get adopted speedily, but Robertson does not even get off the hook on the overseas issue since the Christian right is happy to undermine access to abortion and contraception in other countries also. And someone would have to adopt the “weird” and the “blended” looking ones as well.

Re: “Why does anyone still listen to Pat Robertson?”

That seems a natural question to ask. Marion Robertson is so nutty, and says such outrageous, lunatic stuff, that one immediately wonders who bothers listening to him. If one assumes him to be part of a “lunatic fringe” of American society and Christianity, it makes absolutely no sense that the guy would even still be on the air any more. He’d long ago have drifted off into oblivion.

I’d suggest the answer to this conundrum is not to wonder why this “lunatic fringe” character is still around … but rather, to concede that he’s not “fringe” at all. A lot of people think the way he does. Lots of folks like hearing this stuff from him. His views are not those of a tiny number of fanatical extremists, but rather, are held — to one degree or another — by a much larger bloc of society.

The sooner we all understand it, the sooner we can deal with the fact that a significant proportion of Americans are basically militant religionists whose minds were lost long ago, who can no longer be reasoned with, and whose views can no longer be accepted as having the slightest validity. There are millions of these folk, perhaps even tens of millions. They exert an enormous amount of influence, but we can no longer afford to let them run the show any more.

So the short answer to the above question is, “Because lots of Americans think he’s right!” And that, my friends, is frightening.

 Ah, so he’s not a True Christian™? Apparently, enough people think he is to keep him on TV.

 Yup – this is what Dan Savage calls a superpower.  Those kids give her the superpower of being able to tell right off the bat if the guy is worth the trouble.  Just tell him and Bingo!  you know whether he’s a grownup or not.

i completely agree with you. Pat is an idiot. I am an adoptive mother and a believer in jesus. And I am embarrassed that this man still has a public voice and pretends that he is a voice for many. I agree that religion itself can breed awful things. But Jesus is not about religion and I am confident that He will deal with that man some day. 

As an adoptive mom who has learned much about the business of adoption in the world….I agree with you that much of it becomes a supply/demand scenario, which is sad and extremely corrupt and immeasurably unhelpful. Ideally a child should get to stay in their country, be adopted by a local family, and grow up to be a beneficial citizen of that country. But, this not always (actually very rarely) is an option. Impoverished countries sometimes don’t have the resources to care for all the orphans that are left behind by way and genocide. It’s just a fact. We have an adopted son from the Congo who is HIV positive. The wonderful people of the Congo simply are not financially and physically equipped to deal with that. So, what’s the solution? Certainly not to let them die in an orphanage because their might be a child in the US foster care system that needs a home more? Who can say what child is more deserving of a home and a family and decent medical care? I assure you that I took no part in a supporting a corrupt industry, and it had nothing to do with my desire to raise a child (I already had 3). It has to do with the fact that this child would have died without it. Don’t generalize all international adoptive families….or you might put yourself in the same category as MR Robertson himself.

Don’t generalize all international adoptive families….
The problem is not that the adoptive families are knowingly adopting stolen children, rather it is that they have no way of knowing. Even in the case of your adopted son, how can you know that his parents willingly gave him up even in the face of his disease? Yes, your son will receive better care and live a longer life in the USA than back in the Congo, but that would be true of any Congolese child, with or without HIV. In fact, it would also be true of a child taken from a poor American family. One must be very careful about going down this path.

 Go tell him that. In fact get all of your Christian friends together, get your churches together, band together and make a national organization to tell Pat Robertson he’s wrong. Make your voices heard, because right now you’re allowing the crazies to take the stage.

I’m an adoptive mother as well, but an atheist. Pat Robertson is a fucking asshole. My little girl is the sweetest and smartest kid I know. Jesus won’t deal with Robertson as we no longer exist when we die. All we can hope is that Pat Robertson’s time on his show comes to an end soon.

Not all children are taken from birth parents. Many children come up for adoption for the same reasons they come up here. The woman has more children that she wants to take care of, the mother is too young, the mother does not want to be a mother, the parents regard the pregnacy as a shame on the family, etc.

No, he’s not correct: In the U.S. alone, there are always more children awaiting adoption than there are adoptive parents. Tens of thousands every year.
Pat Robertson is a vile, petty, ignorant man – a truly horrible person and a complete fraud. Millions of children around the world are breathing a sigh of relief that he’s not looking to adopt.

Why is this dick still on TV? And why does that African-American woman stay on that show?

Pat Robertson’s position on marijuana is much much much more sane and compassionate than that of Obama.

It’s like Julia Sweeney says in her show: “You mean Hitler—Hitler
just died? You mean nobody sat him down and said ‘You fucked up, buddy, and now
you’re going to spend an eternity in HELL!’” I’m an atheist as well, which has changed my whole position on things like capital punishment. The only retribution for us is on this side of life. On the other side is, to the best of our knowledge, annihilation. Pat Robertson can rot in his cesspool of hate for all I care. What matters is stopping him from hurting innocent people and from hurting those who don’t know that they can think for themselves and think that Robertson speaks for God.

Re: “No militant religionist has ever forced me to do anything. Not even once.”

You’re lucky. They love making people do things. For instance, they’ve campaigned to coerce store personnel to say “Merry Christmas” to everyone … without regard to whether or not that store employee, or the person s/he’s talking to, celebrates Christmas.

They’re guilty of a lot more coercion than you may even be aware of.

Re: “I went to a public school system that taught values offensive to many religious people… yet those religious people were forced to pay for the public schools. I’ve never been forced to pay for their religous schools or institutions.”
Yes, and Quakers … who are pacifists … are required to pay taxes, some of which goes to the Pentagon, and they object to that. They’ve attempted to litigate that, but the bottom line is, they have to pay their taxes anyway.

I object to the 2008 bail-outs; I don’t think my tax money should have funded them. I object to corporate welfare and other kinds of commercial bribery (e.g. when a government uses tax-abatements to draw in businesses). But I still have to pay my taxes too.

The cost of living in any society is that at least some of one’s tax money ends up going places one would personally rather not let it go to. But you know what? Too bad. The mature thing to do is accept it and move on.

As for being forced to pay for religious institutions, particularly schools, taxpayers in Louisiana very well end up doing exactly that.

Re: “… perhaps a well-reasoned specific example where these supposed militants are forcing their beliefs on others?

I just gave you two. My guess is, you’ll argue them away. If you need more, though, I can always provide them. They’re not hard to come up with.

The problem, Katie, is that he is a voice for many. Millions hang upon his every word. If it were only a matter of Pat and a few others like him saying stupid things once in a while to which no one paid any attention, we hell-bound atheists and God-cursed liberals wouldn’t be so up in arms.

Liberal and moderate Christians claim to disapprove of reactionary fundamentalists like Pat, but apart from Jim Wallis opening his mouth once in a while, Christians have pretty much stood by and said nothing while they’ve commandeered society – all the while crying about how persecuted and victimized they are.

The best advice this woman could be given is not to ask Pat Robertson for advice.

For me, honestly, adoption is the first choice. I’ve never wanted to be pregnant. My partner and I have talked about it many times and plan to adopt in the future. We’re not sure if we will go the domestic or international route, but we’d be fine with either.

However, I do think our views make us part of a minority. Most people want biological children. I’ve never really understood why, but they do. And I think American society in general is biased against adoption, so you’re only going to get people who are committed to the idea who are willing to adopt.

The only thing “freaky” about this woman is she obviously has an imaginary friend in the sky and she asks Pat Robertson for advice.

As I always say, the poor and starving need bread and blankets, not Bibles and bullsh-t.

Really, what facts do you have to support this ridiculous statement that there are no Christians or others who would adopt children instead ofcseeingbthem killed? This is nothing more than an attempt to justify the killing of unborn children. Tell me the statistics of all these mothers who would not have aborted their babies if only there was someone to adopt them.

As for Christians not adopting foreign children you are flat out wrong. Thousands of them do it every year.