Wednesday night on the "Anderson Cooper 360" segment "The Ridiculist," host Anderson Cooper took televangelist Pat Robertson of "The 700 Club" to task over his statement that gay men have special rings designed to cut people and infect them with HIV.
Cooper described Robertson as being like "that elderly relative who you only see at Thanksgiving. He doesn't get out of bed much and he's sitting around the table and he suddenly blurts out nonsensical sentences in between chewing on soft foods."
To wit, Robertson said during a "700 Club" broadcast, "You know what they do in San Francisco? Some in the gay community there, they want to get people so if they got the stuff they’ll have a ring, you shake hands, and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger. Really. It’s that kind of vicious stuff, which would be the equivalent of murder.”
"Really?" said Cooper in response. "A ring that gives you AIDS. I've never seen that section at Zales, have you?"
"Robertson has since backpedaled," Cooper continued, "saying that he was misunderstood and that he was talking about something he was warned about decades ago by security officers at a meeting in San Francisco, which still is all kind of baffling."
He went on to play a clip reel of some of Robertson's most outrageously wrong-headed statements about LGBT people, including the idea that "demonic possession" leads men to have sex with other men and the statement that seeing "two same sex guys kissing" makes him "want to throw up." Cooper also played clips of Robertson's thoughts on heterosexual sex, like the time he urged a woman to stay with her cheating husband because ultimately it was her fault he was going astray.
The wealthy televangelist has also shared his belief that "demons" are involved in martial arts and yoga.
“Thank you, Pat Robertson," Cooper concluded. "You are a true crusader. And we definitely didn’t consider just permanently changing this segment to 'The Pat Robertson List,' although it does have a certain ring to it.”
Watch the video, embedded below via CNN:
