I was minding my own business yesterday when someone I follow on Twitter linked to this article. Yes, it’s in that liberal satan-site Huffington Post, but here’s the Google search in case you want to find corroborative evidence.

For those of you who are not going to click on that, it’s about disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and his statement that—and I quote—”Trump is a test whether you’re even saved,” he said in a clip going viral on Twitter. “Only saved people can love Trump.”

Honey, please.

Let me state for the record that I don’t give a hoot about this or any other person’s theology. As far as I’m concerned, Jim Bakker can believe that if he worships Trump enough he’ll be rewarded with many turtles in Heaven. Who cares?

However, when a charlatan like Bakker can’t even adhere to the theology he’s grifting from, duty requires me to speak up.

Simply put, if the Holy Inquisition were still around Bakker would be burned at the stake as a heretic. Yes, we know that in their day you were required to practically worship your sovereign, since they were of course placed there by God himself, but the Church would have taken a dim view of any priest who began preaching that you must idolize Lorenzo di Medici or you’d be damned to hell.

In the article, Bakker contorts himself through some pretty Scholastic hoops to say that Christians must forgive—without saying exactly what the Christians might need to forgive in Trump—but even that is heresy: ‘one is not saved by works but by faith alone’ is a shibboleth that even Bakker would spout if there were time before the commercial.

None of this is anomalous for Bakker; he spouts crazy stuff every day, insane/Uncle Ted/streetcorner stuff. So here’s my question: why is he still on TV? Why does he still have sponsors? Why is he given a platform anywhere other than  his own basement and aforementioned street corner?

Who is paying for this, and why?