“Duck Dynasty Bigots Will Fade Into Obscurity”: The Robertsons Are Country-Clubbers Posing As Rednecks
Now that I’ve actually seen a few episodes, Duck Dynasty is relatively harmless entertainment. Whatever “reality TV” means, it’s definitely not that. It’s a semi-scripted sitcom, basically cornball self-parody. Think Hee Haw without the music. I find it utterly inane, but then I don’t watch TV with children.
The “tell” is the show’s women; cute Southern sorority girls turned mommies. In real life, no way would those women tolerate their “menfolk” running around looking like a truckload of ZZ Top impersonators. They’re also not going on TV with hay in their hair like some Hollywood director’s idea of a country girl. Every comedy needs a straight man; on Duck Dynasty it’s the women.
But realism? Please. The beards, hair and overalls are costumes every bit as theatrical as the outfits the Rolling Stones wear onstage. In the rural Arkansas county where I live, you could hang around the feed store for a month without seeing anybody like Duck Dynasty “patriarch” (and head bigot) Phil Robertson. And if you did, his wife wouldn’t have any teeth.
The Robertsons are country-clubbers posing as rednecks. Duck hunting itself — requiring, as it does, quite a bit of expensive gear and pricey leases — is mainly a rich man’s pastime in the South. Deer hunting makes economic sense; duck hunting’s a luxury. It’s what doctors, lawyers and bankers do when the weather’s too lousy for golf. Bill Clinton used to go duck hunting once a year to prove he loved guns.
(My own most recent—and final—duck hunting trip began with me tasked with lugging an outboard motor across a muddy soybean field at 5:30 AM. Never again.)
But I digress. Although many Southerners wince at yokel stereotypes, the basic Duck Dynasty joke is that every redneck is a Peter Pan at heart. The Robertson men spend their time bickering like children and making mischief with pickup trucks, ATVs, shotguns, handguns, deer rifles, chainsaws, outboard motors, dynamite, etc. Basically anything that makes loud noises and/or throws mud around.
How long, I wonder, before the Duck Dynasty boys endorse the “Bad Boy” brand of riding mowers? Currently represented by a half-clothed model urging guys to “Get a Bad Boy, Baby!” these machines have the magical capacity to convert a tax accountant mowing a suburban half-acre under his wife’s supervision to a daredevil NASCAR racer. Yee Haw!
But the laughter ended abruptly when “Duck Commander” Phil Robertson inserted himself into the nation’s vituperative culture wars. The whole thing looked like a publicity stunt gone wrong—possibly successful in the short run, but almost certain to prove destructive in the end.
Concerning which, a few thoughts:
First, Sarah Palin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal notwithstanding, nobody has a First Amendment right to appear on TV. Make controversial public pronouncements deeply offensive to your employers, and you’d better have a backup plan.
The creator and producer of Duck Dynasty is one Scott Gurney, who once appeared in a gay-themed film called The Fluffer. (Don’t ask.)
The guy helps make you rich and famous, and you denounce gays as evil? That’s appalling.
Second, it has nothing to do with Christianity. Robertson didn’t just say he’s against gay marriage, nor even that God is. He spoke in the coarsest possible terms about homosexuality, equating it with bestiality.
He’s elsewhere characterized gay men and women as “full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God haters, they are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless, they invent ways of doing evil.”
Here’s my favorite moral philosopher, Fox News’ own Bill O’Reilly:
“It’s not about the Bible, or believing or not believing in the Bible. It’s singling out a group, could be any group, and saying to that group ‘Hey, you’re not worthy. You’re not worthy in the eyes of the Lord, or in the eyes of God, you’re not worthy because of who you are.’ So once you get that personal, once you get down into that kind of a realm, problems arise.”
Third, 10 years ago, many of the same people portraying Robertson as a martyr burned Dixie Chicks CDs and cheered their banishment from country radio stations for the terrible crime of saying they were embarrassed by George W. Bush before everybody was.
And those girls have genuine talent.
Fourth, as for the happy, singing darkies of Robertson’s Louisiana childhood, where are they on Duck Dynasty? Know what the African-American population of Monroe/West Monroe is? It’s roughly 60 percent. I’ve seen no black faces on the program.
Another prominent American from West Monroe is Boston Celtics great Bill Russell—a black man who’s been known to have strong opinions about race. Maybe Robertson ought to talk with him, although it wouldn’t be easy.
Duck Dynasty may be this month’s right wing cause célèbre. Longer term, however, unapologetic bigots always fade into obscurity, basically because they embarrass people.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, December 26, 2013
“Evangelical Church’s Ugly Truth”: Duck Dynasty And Christian Racists
The Evangelical Church has a racism problem. And it is incumbent on us in this Christmas season to tell the truth about that. Recently A&E suspended Phil Robertson, the patriarch of its hit show, “Duck Dynasty,” for making incredibly homophobic statements in a GQ magazine interview. In typical fashion, he affirmed his evangelical belief that homosexuality is a sin, but went even further, comparing gay people’s sexual behavior to bestiality, and declaring emphatically that they would not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.
Liberal-minded folk, some Christians included, have been outraged at his homophobia, while conservative Christians of all races jumped to defend his right to free speech. Many of these Christians feel particularly threatened by what they call “censorship” of Robertson, because the belief that homosexuality is a sin, and the right to declare that belief freely without recourse, has become for many of these people a defining marker of their identity as Christians.
A reluctant evangelical, I reject conservative theological teachings on homosexuality; the violence that the Church does to gay people in the name of God is indeed one of the primary reasons for my reluctance. But I am also ambivalent about the Church because of its continued subjugation of women and its failure to be forthright about its continuing racism problem.
I grew up in a black baptist church, in a small town in North Central Louisiana, about 30 miles west of where “Duck Dynasty” is filmed. I made my first “profession of faith” in Jesus Christ while at a white baptist church I had visited with my childhood best friend, Amanda, when I was about 7 years old. I was baptized at the age of 13.
At 33 years of age, my disillusionment with the church — which has come to full bloom in the last five years or so — is the thing that perhaps most solidly marks me as a member of the Millennial generation. Though I am often ambivalent about that label, too, I still get why Millennials, fed up with the vile homophobia of the church — as particularly evidenced by the “Duck Dynasty” episode — are leaving the institution in droves. But in the fervor and closing of ranks over Robertson’s homophobia, many Christians, white and Black, old and young alike, have missed the racist remarks he made in that same interview. Millennials, it turns out, haven’t proven themselves to be fundamentally better on race, despite post-racial proclamations to the contrary.
Apparently, according to Robertson, 1950s and 60s Louisiana — the Louisiana of his childhood — was a happy heavenly place where Black people hoed cotton and eschewed the blues:
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field. … They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word! … Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
I have several aunts and uncles and a grandparent who would beg to differ with Robertson’s account of events. In 1956, several hundred African Americans were purged from the voter registration rolls in Monroe, and spent years struggling to be re-enfranchised.
I’m reminded of these words from James Baldwin’s essay “A Fly in Buttermilk”:
“Segregation has worked brilliantly in the South, and in fact, in the nation to this extent: It has allowed white people with scarcely any pangs of conscience whatever, to create, in every generation only the Negro they wished to see.”
But racism and colonization have also allowed white people, like Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, to create the Jesus they wish to see, too: a blonde, blue-eyed white man with long hair. Now my Bible says that Jesus was a Jew with Egyptian (Read: African) ancestry (Matthew 1). But many white people are decidedly uncomfortable worshipping a God that doesn’t look like them.
As Evangelicalism goes, racism, homophobia, and sexism go hand in hand. Black evangelicals like to tell themselves that they can reject Christianity’s racist past, while embracing homophobic and sexist ideas about the position of gay people and women, in the world and the church. I have come to say: It just isn’t so.
God is not a racist. I know that despite a Bible that sanctions enslavement and implores slaves to obey and be kind to their masters.
God is not a sexist. I know that despite a Bible that tells me that women are to be quiet in church, that women are not to teach men, that women are to submit.
God is not a homophobe. I know that despite a Bible that declares sex between men to be an abomination.
God is love. That is a truth I learned first and foremost from the Bible. And it holds moral and political weight for me because of the life that Jesus Christ lived, from birth to death and back again.
I love the Church, despite myself. But I won’t love it uncritically. This is what hermeneutic consistency requires. And worshipping alongside white folks who are more moved to stand with a homophobe than to stand against racism gives me great pause.
The Church can no longer afford to be disingenuous about its racism problem. Easy unity is not what we need. Time has run out for an African American Church that continues to tack hard to the right — uncritically imbibing the agenda of the (white) Evangelical Right, without acknowledging that this position, predicated as it is on the belief that Christian = Republican, is fundamentally averse to, and in some ways responsible for, the declining social and political condition of African Americans, gay and straight alike.
Ironically enough, the progressive Christians who inspire me the most these days are white. Rachel Held Evans, Jay Bakker, Brian McLaren and theologian Peter Enns are fighting the good fight of faith. But I won’t let any of them off the hook for their failure to be more forthright in addressing racism. Evans, Bakker and McLaren are great on questions of homophobia, poverty and sexism; but racism, when it is addressed at all, is largely addressed as a problem of individual attitudes rather than systemic disfranchisement. What Robertson’s statements point to, however, is that individual prejudices, and the amelioration of them, are bound up with the structures that support them. After all, it wasn’t his racist statements that got him suspended.
This is the season of hope. And I am hopeful. Because even though Phil Robertson said gay people would not inherit the kingdom of God, Jesus did say that the Kingdom of God is within us. Phil Robertson and his ilk don’t possess the keys to the kingdom. We do.
By: Brittany Cooper, Contributing Writer, Salon, December 24, 2013
“The Duck And Jackass Dynasty”: Has It Become Acceptable Again For An American Politician To Embrace Unashamed Bigotry?
I got the gist of the “Duck Dynasty” thing after my first and only viewing: bunch of rural jackasses who somehow struck it rich get brought into our living rooms to be laughed at by the rest of us aristocrats.
Well, all right. When the archetype first appeared on television via the “Beverly Hillbillies” it was also enormously popular, but also taken as an illustration of how TV was living down to its condemnation by FCC Chairman Newton Minow as a “vast wasteland.”
In any event, A&E knew what it was doing when it put these people on the air, so its show of indignation in “suspending” one of them for speaking out against gays and the aspirations of African Americans falls a little flat.
What’s truly ghastly, however, is the reaction of a couple of political figures. Sarah Palin‘s opinion isn’t worth the eleven words I’ve just written to dismiss it. But Bobby Jindal still holds down office as the governor of Louisiana. That raises the question: Has it become acceptable again for an American politician to embrace unashamed bigotry?
In the old days, news that public funds (via the Louisiana state film and television incentive program) had helped finance racism and gay-bashing of the variety espoused by Phil Robertson, the outspoken duck dynast, would have presented a moral dilemma and created a political embarrassment for a governor. Most self-respecting political leaders would have run away from association with such views; that’s the essence, after all, of the “leadership” part of the equation.
Not for Jindal. His only public statement on the matter thus far has praised Robertson as a member of a family of “great citizens of the State of Louisiana.” He defends Robertson’s views on the “it’s a free country” principle, which as a debating point generally gets dropped by most people before the fourth grade. “Everyone is entitled to express their views,” he says.
In Jindal’s seven-sentence statement, not a word of defense for gay people so crudely mocked by Robertson. Not a word to remind us that the life of black sharecroppers in Louisiana’s Jim Crow era was not “godly” or “happy.”
In January of this year, Jindal lectured his fellow Republicans on the need to “stop being the stupid party.” Remember? He talked about how the Republican brand had been damaged by its candidates’ “offensive and bizarre comments.” That was supposed to represent the launch of a new GOP outreach to communities that had been excluded by Republican doctrine, including the gay and minority communities.
But that was eleven months ago. Now, according to Jindal, Republicans are supposed to embrace offensive and bizarre comments. The party’s transformation into a marginal and regional movement thus continues. Jindal has made himself the biggest jackass in the story, and his career as a national political figure the thing to be laughed at.
By: Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2013
“It’s Instructive Whose Sticking Up For The Worse”: There Are Two Americas, And One Is Better Than The Other
Matt Lewis writes of the controversy over Duck Dynasty that “There really are two Americas” and that the divide over the show “has as much to do with class and geography and culture and attitude as it does with religion.”
That’s true.
Specifically, there’s one America where comparing homosexuality to bestiality is considered acceptable, and another where it is rude and offensive.
In one America, it’s OK to say this of gays and lesbians: “They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil.” In the other America, you’re not supposed to say that.
There’s one America where it’s OK to say this about black people in the Jim Crow-era South: “Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.” There’s another America where that statement is considered to reflect ignorance and insensitivity.
In one America, it’s OK to attribute the Pearl Harbor attacks to Shinto Buddhists’ failure to accept Jesus. In the other America, that is not OK.
There are two Americas, one of which is better than the other. And it’s instructive who’s sticking up for the worse America.
The conservative politicians who are complaining that Phil Robertson’s firing flies in the face of “free speech” are generally smart enough to understand that Robertson doesn’t actually have a legal right to be on A&E. When Sarah Palin and her cohorts talk about the importance of “free speech,” they mean something much more specific: That the sorts of things that Robertson said are not the sorts of things a private employer should want to fire someone for saying. That they are, or ought to be, within the bounds of social acceptability.
But they’re wrong. The other America — the America I live in — has this one right. Racist and anti-gay comments and comments disparaging of religious minorities are rude and unacceptable and might cost you your job. It’s not OK to say that gay people are “full of murder.”
I will add one caveat, in the vein of Andrew Sullivan’s comments. The things Phil Robertson said should get you fired from most jobs. But starring on a reality show is a special kind of job, one where demonstrating that you are a good person who follows good social conventions may not be necessary.
For example, if at a Business Insider function I were to flip over a table and call one of my colleagues a “prostitution whore,” I’d probably be fired. But when a Real Housewife of New Jersey does that, she’s doing her job just fine. Similarly, Phil Robertson represents some very real pathologies of his culture, and his job is to provide a look into the reality of that culture to the TV viewer.
In some sense, when Robertson compares gays to terrorists, he’s doing his job, too. So I’m sympathetic to the idea that A&E shouldn’t suspend him for this. But if they shouldn’t suspend him, it’s because it’s acceptable for Robertson to say unacceptable things, not because his remarks were acceptable.
By: Josh Barro, Business Insider, December 20, 2013
“Hate In A Neat Little Package”: When You Defend Phil Robertson, Here’s What You’re Really Defending
Let’s get a few things straight about what Phil Robertson said that got him in trouble.
Defenses of Robertson, the star of “Duck Dynasty” suspended for his remarks in an interview with GQ, have focused on the idea that he was just crudely expressing the sincere, Christian view that homosexuality is sinful.
Condemnation of Robertson therefore amounts to condemnation of views that are part of Christian doctrine. What are Christians to do about the fact that their beliefs require them to condemn homosexual acts? Why are cultural elites oppressing Christians by making it forbidden to express their views?
Robertson’s defenders should read his comments again, because their defenses are off-point. If you’re defending Robertson, here’s what you’re defending:
- Robertson thinks black Americans were treated just fine in the Jim Crow-era South, and that they were happy there. “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
- Robertson thinks the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor because they didn’t believe in Jesus. “All you have to do is look at any society where there is no Jesus. I’ll give you four: Nazis, no Jesus. Look at their record. Uh, Shintos? They started this thing in Pearl Harbor. Any Jesus among them? None. Communists? None. Islamists? Zero. That’s eighty years of ideologies that have popped up where no Jesus was allowed among those four groups. Just look at the records as far as murder goes among those four groups.”
- Robertson hates gay people. Robertson in 2010: “Women with women, men with men, they committed indecent acts with one another, and they received in themselves the due penalty for their perversions. They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil.”
This last one is key. My inbox is full of “love the sinner, hate the sin” defenses of Robertson’s 2013 remarks. But Robertson doesn’t love gay people. He thinks they’re, well, “full of murder.” His views on gays are hateful, inasmuch as they are full of hate.
As a side note, it’s remarkable how often these things come as a package. Robertson’s sincere doctrinal view about the sinfulness of homosexuality comes packaged with animus toward gays and retrograde views about blacks and non-Christians. It’s almost as though social conservatism is primarily fueled by a desire to protect the privileges of what was once a straight, white Christian in-group, rather than by sincere religious convictions.
You might recall that conservatives are currently trying to figure out what to do about the fact that the Republican Party performs quite poorly with the growing share of voters who are not white, straight Christians. They think some of it has to do with economic issues. But then they’re scratching their heads, trying to figure out how Mitt Romney lost the Asian American vote 3-to-1 even though, by Republican “maker-vs.-taker” metrics, Asian Americans are disproportionately likely to be “makers.”
Non-whites and non-Christians and gays keep getting the sense that, even setting aside policy, conservatives and Republicans just don’t care for them. The “Duck Dynasty” episode, with Ted Cruz and others rushing out to defend Robertson’s honor, is just another example of why.
By: Josh Barro, Business Insider, December 21, 2013
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