Haiti, The Devil, and WoW
This really pisses me off because it's more than just the right wing's standard "blame the victim" game. It's a racist dig against the ancestors of many Haitians, and plenty of Haitians themselves, because the event Pat Robertson discusses did actually happen.
Sort of.
Maybe.
Well, probably not. But it's told, because it's a very poetic story. On the eve of the revolution, the Haitian slaves sacrificed a pig as a part of a ritual calling on their god's favor against the evil ghosts who had enslaved them (I'm being a little silly, here. It's true that early contact with white people worried Africans because they looked like ghosts, but probably not that they still thought so after they'd been growing sugar for decades).
These people were practically begging God for help against what, to them, was some sort of unholy cross between Sauron, Darth Vader, and Voldemort*. And, eventually this paid off (probably because they were praying to the god who thinks that dragging an entire race across an ocean to enslave them is not OK, as opposed to the French, who were praying to the God who thinks it's perfectly acceptable, as long as you don't beat them too hard unless they deserve it and only occasionally rape their women, you know, if you buy into the whole "divine intervention" possibility).
In any case, calling this whole thing a "Deal With the Devil" says that Pat Robertson thinks his god was on the side of the French**, and that vodou (a religion I probably know infinitely more about than Pat does) is little more than a devil-worshipping cult, and, possibly, that the only conceivable way a bunch of slaves could defeat the French army was with the help of this guy.
EDIT: Oh, forget I said anything. Pat has apologized.
*Reads apology*
Scratch that. Pat's handlers have apologized. By pointing out that "countless scholars and religious figures over the centuries...believe the country is cursed". And he didn't say the earthquake was directly caused by God. He said he hopes that all the black people take the earthquake as a wake-up call and stop worshipping the Devil.
Thanks, Pat. You're a real class act.
* These people looked pretty freaky, from a black person's point of view, used strange weapons and technology, seemed to believe all of this cruelty was justified because the African's were mostly a different color than them, and were able to summon large, unstoppable armies from across the seas.
** Sorry. Little joke there. I meant to say Pat seems to think God was on the side of the slavers.