Charles Finch

Pat Robertson, who endorsed Rudy Giuliani yesterday, once blamed this bizarre roster of culprits for the attacks of September 11th: "Pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union and the People For the American Way." That this is incoherent is beside the point; what's salient is that Rudy Giuliani values the endorsement of the man who said that. And who once led a 21 day "prayer campaign" for a vacancy on the Supreme Court. And who said, "You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist."

Media Matters (one of my favorite websites) has documented the insufficiency of the coverage of the endorsement. Still, there are three things to say here. One, that a country in which Pat Robertson and Christopher Hitchens have about the same Q Rating may be irretrievably riven; two, that there still isn't a consensus about homophobia as there is about, say, racism (imagine if Robertson had said "blacks," rather than "gays"); and three, that the Republican party is delusional if it believes that evangelicals are or were ever the key to their success. After all, the vast majority of Pat Robertson fans support President Bush, and his numbers remain exiguous.