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“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:

  1. 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.”
  2. 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.”
  3. 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

December 23, 2013 Posted by | Bigotry, Racism | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Duck Dynasty And Quackery”: Intolerance That Is Disarming Is The Most Dangerous Kind

I must admit that I’m not a watcher of “Duck Dynasty,” but I’m very much aware of it. I, too, am from Louisiana, and the family on the show lives outside the town of Monroe, which is a little over 50 miles from my hometown. We’re all from the sticks.

So, when I became aware of the homophobic and racially insensitive comments that the patriarch on the show, Phil Robertson, made this week in an interview in GQ magazine, I thought: I know that mind-set.

Robertson’s interview reads as a commentary almost without malice, imbued with a matter-of-fact, this-is-just-the-way-I-see-it kind of Southern folksiness. To me, that is part of the problem. You don’t have to operate with a malicious spirit to do tremendous harm. Insensitivity and ignorance are sufficient. In fact, intolerance that is disarming is the most dangerous kind. It can masquerade as morality.

A&E, which airs “Duck Dynasty,” moved quickly to suspend Robertson, as his comments engaged the political culture wars, with liberals condemning him and conservatives — including Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a possible presidential candidate — rushing to his defense.

Let me first say that Robertson has a constitutionally protected right to voice his opinion and A&E has a corporate right to decide if his views are consistent with its corporate ethos. No one has a constitutional right to a reality show. I have no opinion on the suspension. That’s A&E’s call.

In fact, I don’t want to focus on the employment repercussions of what Robertson said, but on the content of it. In particular, I want to focus on a passage on race from the interview, in which Robertson says:

“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.”

While this is possible, it is highly improbable. Robertson is 67 years old, born into the Jim Crow South. Only a man blind and naïve to the suffering of others could have existed there and not recognized that there was a rampant culture of violence against blacks, with incidents and signs large and small, at every turn, on full display. Whether he personally saw interpersonal mistreatment of them is irrelevant.

Louisiana helped to establish the architecture for Jim Crow. First, there were the Black Codes that sought to control interactions between blacks and whites and constrain black freedom. The Jim Crow Encyclopedia even points out that in one Louisiana town, Opelousas, “freedmen needed the permission of their employers to enter town.”

Then, in 1890, the State Legislature passed the Separate Car Act, which stipulated that all railway companies in the state “shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races” in their coaches. The landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case was a Louisiana case challenging that law. The United States Supreme Court upheld the law, a ruling that provided the underpinning for state-sponsored racial segregation, and Jim Crow laws spread.

Robertson’s comments conjure the insidious mythology of historical Southern fiction, that of contented slave and benevolent master, of the oppressed and the oppressors gleefully abiding the oppression, happily accepting their wildly variant social stations. This mythology posits that there were two waves of ruination for Southern culture, the Civil War and the civil rights movement, that made blacks get upset and things go downhill.

Robertson’s comments also display a staggering ignorance about the place and meaning of song in African-American suffering. As for the singing of the blues in particular, the jazz musician Amina Claudine Myers points out in an essay that the blues was heard in the late 1800s and “came from the second generation of slaves, Black work songs, shouts and field hollers, which originated from African call-and-response singing.” Work songs, the blues and spirituals were not easily separated.

Furthermore, Robertson doesn’t seem to acknowledge the possibility that black workers he encountered possessed the most minimal social sophistication and survival skills necessary to not confess dissatisfaction to a white person on a cotton farm (no matter how “trashy” that white person might think himself).

It’s impossible to know if Robertson recognizes the historical resonance and logical improbability of his comments. But that’s not an excuse.

By: Charles. M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 20, 2013

December 21, 2013 Posted by | Racism | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Lying Through His Teeth”: The Anatomy Of Mitt “The Jokester”

Today, let’s do a favor for Mitt Romney.

Not on your to-do list?

Indulge me.

You have undoubtedly heard the story about a bullying episode during Romney’s high school years. The Washington Post quoted former classmates who said that Mitt had led an attack on a kid who had bleached blond hair that he wore over one eye. While the others held the boy down, Romney cut off the offending tresses.

Let me say right off the bat that stuff politicians did when they were in high school shouldn’t count. And while this appears to be a particularly mean, and possibly homophobic, incident, it is really a good idea to stick to that rule. Otherwise, we would have to go back to the question of whether Barack Obama ate dog meat in Indonesia and we will never move on to health care reform.

But about the hair-cutting story. When Mitt was asked about it, he said he did not “recall the incident.”

This puts a whole new spin on things. The idea that Romney could have absolutely no recollection of this event is way more shocking than the incident itself. Did he engage in this sort of behavior so often that things just sort of ran together?

I don’t believe he’s that lacking in feeling. So I propose that we give him the benefit of the doubt and agree that he is lying through his teeth.

Yes! And, honestly, it’s a good bet. We have seen far less evidence of Romney as a guy with a mean streak than of Romney as a robotic campaigner who finds it impossible to speak in an open, unprogrammed manner — particularly about any incident that makes him look bad.

He probably looks back at what he did and feels terrible. Then he represses that genuine emotion and tells Fox News that it’s all a blank to him, but that, if anyone was offended by the thing he doesn’t even recall happening, he is very, very sorry.

He is incapable, really, of admitting past errors. Perhaps you may remember that Romney once drove to Canada with the family Irish setter stuck in a cage on the station wagon roof. When he was originally asked about it, he claimed the dog “loves fresh air.”

This was more than four years ago. What would have happened if Romney had just said: “Boy, in retrospect that really does sound like a bad idea. But you have to remember that we had five boys under the age of 14. It was like living in a vortex; we did all kinds of stupid stuff.”

Do you think the nation — particularly the part that has ever tried to drive long distances with a car full of children — would have been understanding? I personally would never have mentioned the incident at all.

But since we haven’t gotten that sort of input, I kind of feel free to bring it up now and then.

Romney supporters have made a vague attempt to lump the hair-cutting incident in with Mitt’s long history of pranksterism. “You know, you hold the scissors close to his ear and you make a lot of snipping sounds, and you may traumatize the guy a little or scare the guy a little, but no harm, no foul,” Gregg Dearth, another Romney classmate, told ABC News.

It certainly is true that Mitt has a longstanding affinity for practical jokes. Let’s revisit a few:

• Invited to the wedding in which his wife was one of the bridesmaids, Romney livened up the afternoon by snitching the groom’s shoes and using nail polish to write H-E-L-P on the soles so all the guests could see it when the happy couple knelt down to take their marital vows.

• On his first visit to the White House during the Clinton administration, Romney protested when he was handed a red visitors’ badge with the letter A. “I’m not the one that cheated on my wife. He should be wearing the scarlet A, not me,” Mitt said, repeatedly, to the fun-loving White House security staff.

• During his stint in France, Romney entertained a homesick and undoubtedly edgy fellow young missionary by coming to his door wearing a sheet and impersonating a French terrorist/bandit.

• A teacher who students enjoyed making fun of for his poor eyesight was walking with Romney and some of his classmates when they came to two sets of glass doors. Mitt opened the first for his professor, swept his hand forward to indicate the second set was open as well, and then laughed hysterically when the teacher smacked into the closed door.

That last one was in high school, so we’re not counting it. Except as part of a lifelong pattern of fun.

 

By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 11, 2012

 

May 12, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , | Leave a comment

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