The author of the original expose, Bill Sizemore, now has another great article on Robertson's past and details on how he came into the ministry and got involved with TV.
From Sizemore's piece:
In the decade between the time The 700 Club became a daily program and the midseventies, CBN purchased a new facility in Portsmouth with a 175,000-watt transmitter, then a staggering 2.25-million-watt transmitter that could reach most of the mid-Atlantic coastline. Robertson also purchased five radio stations in New York State and new TV stations in Atlanta and Dallas. Then, in 1976, CBN bought a satellite and, months later, broadcast its first feed from Jerusalem. Robertson’s teleministry was now big business. In 1972, Robertson wrote that you can’t “worry about technical production when the cameraman is caught up in the Spirit and begins to weep over someone’s testimony . . . Who cares about the time if God is moving?” But only a few years later, CBN’s brand of production had become distinctly professional. No longer were broadcast slots subject to whim. No more was airtime filled with homemade puppet shows.
Along with the increasingly political slant of the show came more and more secularized programming, aimed at broadening the network’s appeal. CBN began showing family-friendly reruns like Lassie to help finance pricey advertisements for The 700 Club on other networks. Soon, secular shows took up the bulk of CBN’s airtime. This shift led to Robertson’s first run-in with the government, when the state of Massachusetts realized that the programming on WXNE-TV in Boston, purchased by CBN in 1977, was more than 50 percent secular. The station could be tax-exempt only if it functioned as a church instead of a business. Robertson subsequently shifted his holdings to a new company, Continental Broadcasting—some said this shift was to prevent the state from accessing CBN’s financial records.
This glitch did little to slow CBN’s progress, however. The station was finally beginning to turn a profit, after years of surviving on charity from Robertson’s father and local donors. The gifts had often been generous (a local car dealer, for example, once gave Robertson a free Lincoln), but Robertson’s wife still had to work in a local hospital to support their four children—two boys and two girls. By the middle seventies, though, Robertson’s risky decision to “renounce wealth and privilege” to pursue a life of Christian televangelism was suddenly paying off in a whole lot of wealth and privilege.
Robertson is one of the loudest Religious Right figures, and IMHO, there is more reason for him to be investigated more than the six that Grassley has recently focused on. Why? He's used non-profit resources to push his own for-profit ventures for years now. Even with the shake, for-profit, which he promotes on a tax-free non-profit religious channel. The lines between churches and businesses have become far too blurred, and it's about damned time to levy taxes against churches who sell lots of products and make lots of money -- they forfeit their right to claim tax exemption when they start running like a for-profit entity.
He and Dobson have for years opposed the McCain-Feingold Finance Reforms that put a dent in their ability to buy influence in DC. Not that Robertson doesn't still have enormous clout there, especially with Bush in the WH and a huge percentage of Regent grads in Washington (but not Adam Key). I think much of the public is misinformed: the overwhelming majority of people do want church-state separation, not the other way around. Here are some of Robertson's greatest hits:
“I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he [Hugo Chavez] thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.” [Link]Gotta love him.
Robertson suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s recent stroke was the result of Sharon’s policy, which he claimed is “dividing God’s land.” [Link]
“You know some of them [college professors] are killers!” [Link]
“I believe it’s [Islam] motivated by demonic power. It is satanic and it’s time we recognize what we’re dealing with. … [T]he goal of Islam, ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not, is world domination.” [Link]
[The following are from the American Taliban]:
"The Islamic people, the Arabs, were the ones who captured Africans, put them in slavery, and sent them to America as slaves. Why would the people in America want to embrace the religion of slavers?"
"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different...More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."
"When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together."
"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."
"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."
"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period."
"[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers."
"[Planned Parenthood] is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism – everything that the Bible condemns."
