Politics & Power Quote by Pat Robertson

Robertson’s sentence is built like a two-step: panic, then procedure. He opens with “an assault on human sexuality,” a phrase engineered to feel bodily and immediate, as if court rulings or social change are not debates but attacks. The genius of “assault” is that it pre-loads the listener’s moral response before any specifics arrive; if you’re under attack, compromise looks like surrender.

Then comes the strategic name-drop: “as Judge Scalia said.” Invoking Scalia doesn’t just lend legal credibility; it reframes a religious-cultural grievance as jurisprudential common sense. Robertson is borrowing the authority of a Supreme Court dissenter to argue that the Court itself has become partisan: “they’ve taken sides in the culture war.” That framing matters. If judges are just another faction, then the public owes them less deference, and religious conservatives can treat constitutional interpretation like a political skirmish.

The pivot to “if we have a democracy” is the real tell. It sounds civic-minded, but it’s a claim about who gets to set the moral baseline. By insisting that “we can elect representatives who will share our point of view and vote those things into law,” Robertson is making majoritarianism the solution to contested rights. The subtext is that certain questions of sexuality shouldn’t be insulated from electoral power; they should be disciplined by it.

Contextually, this sits in the late-20th/early-21st-century backlash to judicial wins for privacy and LGBTQ rights, where the Court is cast as an unelected engine of cultural revolution. Robertson’s intent is less to persuade the undecided than to consolidate a bloc: you’re not losing an argument, you’re being overruled by enemies, and the ballot box is your counterattack.