PAT Robertson recently committed what may be the most startling gaffe of his career. It was a big belly flop of a blunder, one that might have finished off his reputation among conservatives. What’s truly amazing, though, is how little reputation he had left, even before this late offense.
During a CNN interview on April 16, Wolf Blitzer asked Robertson, chairman of the Christian Coalition, for an opinion on “the so-called forced abortions in China.” It wasn’t clear what Blitzer meant by “so-called”— either abortions are forced or they aren’t, and in China they are—but it was a high, hanging softball of a question for any pro-life spokesman. Robertson managed to whiff, somehow. He thought it was worth considering the matter from the perspective of the Chinese government: “They’ve got 1.2 billion people, and they don’t know what to do. If every family over there was allowed to have three or four children, the population would be completely unsustainable.” He went on to cite “the risk of a tremendous unemployment” and the tragic possibility that the Chinese people would become “too restive.” Robertson summed up: “So I think that right now they’re doing what they have to do. I don’t agree with the forced abortion, but I don’t think the United States needs to interfere with what they’re doing.”
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