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Dear people in public life: When you love your job, there is a nobility in working until you die, but retirement is a valid and respectable option, too. Someone needs to sit down with Pat Robertson and let him know that his views in 2013 don't sound conservative -- they sound like he has lost touch with the world as it is.

To wit, in remarks Tuesday on the 700 Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network, the 83-year-old televangelist asserted that gay men in San Francisco use special rings to spread HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. “You know what they do in San Francisco, some in the gay community there, they want to get people, so if they got the stuff they’ll have a ring, you shake hands, and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger,” Robertson said.

"Really?" asked his co-host, Terry Meeuwsen.

“Yeah, really. It’s that kind of vicious stuff, which would be the equivalent of murder," continued Roberts. "But anyhow.”

Robertson later clarified he was talking about something he was warned about decades ago, saying he regretted that his remarks were misunderstood and telling The Atlantic Wire: "In my own experience, our organization sponsored a meeting years ago in San Francisco where trained security officers warned me about shaking hands because, in those days, certain AIDS-infected activists were deliberately trying to infect people like me by virtue of rings which would cut fingers and transfer blood."



"In no wise were my remarks meant as an indictment of the homosexual community or, for that fact, to those infected with this dreadful disease," Roberts said.