Pat Roberston Just Gave Adopted Children A Scathingly Low PR Blow

Pat RobertsonAs if orphaned children in need of adoptive homes don’t have enough of a PR problem. Mothers like Katherine Heigl and Angelina Jolie may be raising adoption awareness with every paparazzi photo of their family, but Evangelist mogul Pat Roberston just dealt impoverished children a low blow with the claim that these kids grow up “weird.” Not, you know, disabled.

In an episode Robertson’s The 700 Club, the ex-Baptist minister answered a question by a mother with three adopted children. Apparently the single mother is encountering some dating trouble as her suitors are irked by the fact that she has adopted three children from three different countries. Tell them to hit the road, I say, as if you’re elevating your eyebrows at a woman’s children, then you’re just wasting a single mother’s time anyway. But the lucrative businessman then elaborates on why this visceral reaction from the mother’s gentleman callers isn’t wrong:

“A man doesn’t want to take on the United Nations, and this woman’s got all these various children and blended family. What is it?…You just never know what’s been done to a child before you get that child,” he said. “What kind of sexual abuse, what kind of cruelty, what kind of food deprivation, et cetera.”

Robertson also chimes in with that typical, yet anonymous cautionary adoption tale about a friend who adopted a child from Colombia who had brain damage. Coil in fear, prospective adoptive parents! While personal history and development are of course a vital part of considering to adopt, Robertson, a very vocal pro-life advocate, seems to make no pause for this woman’s obvious dedication as a parent. Not even a slight recognition for the importance of adopting children who desperately need homes and guardians. Robertson simply frames adoption as “taking on other people’s problems,” validating many of the scary urban legends that discourage people from even floating the idea of adoption in the first place.

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