Christian televangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson said gay men in San Francisco try to transmit HIV intentionally by cutting people with rings when they shake hands, Right Wing Watch reports. He made his remarks on The 700 Club, which is produced by his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and airs on ABC Family.

“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. It’s that kind of vicious stuff, which would be the equivalent of murder.”

His remarks were made at the end of a segment in which he was responding to a question from a woman about AIDS. CBN edited his remarks out of the version it posted online. CBN had the original YouTube clip of his remarks taken down, but click here to watch The Huffington Post version.

In a statement to clarify his remarks, Robertson said: “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 … [M]y remarks [weren’t] meant as an indictment of the homosexual community or, for that fact, to those infected with this dreadful disease.”

To read the article, click here.

To read the statement, click here.