“Duck Call Is The New Dog Whistle”: What Conservatives Support Is Not “Freedom”, But “Conformity” To A Conservative Culture
Put those dog whistles away. Judging by the hordes of red neck fans who rose up in angry protest after the star of the popular reality show Duck Dynasty was pulled from the airwaves for saying offensive things about blacks and gays, maybe we ought to start referring to these periodic eruptions of right wing agitation as “duck call politics.”
The reactions to duck call politics are as predictable as they are dispiriting. One Facebook friend of mine professed disbelief that her “liberal friends” had not instantaneously rallied around Phil Robertson once the embattled patriarch of Duck Dynasty was temporarily suspended for his tirade against gays which appeared in GQ earlier this month.
“When did America become a Gestapo State?” my friend wanted to know. “Come on people, this has to stop. Regardless of whether you agree with Phil, the America we love has to support his right to his personal convictions and his FREEDOM to say them.”
Sarah Palin has never let the facts stand in the way of an opportunity to stir up the perpetually resentful populist mob. And so, undeterred by the fact she’d never actually read or saw what Robertson had to say about gays and blacks, Palin nevertheless felt competent to weigh in that: “Those offended by what Phil Robertson said are offended by the Gospel.”
Shortly after the Duck Dynasty controversy began on December 18, Palin wrote on her Facebook page that: “Free speech is an endangered species. Those ‘intolerants’ hatin and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us.”
Palin’s comment drew over 428,000 “likes.”
Now, let’s be clear. When former Pope Benedict said that “tradition” based on Sacred Scripture “has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” he was expressing a religious opinion. It may have been hurtful, or wrongheaded, or even un-Christian in my view. But when Benedict said that homosexual acts are “contrary to the natural law” because they “close the sexual act to the gift of life” and do not proceed “from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity” and so “under no circumstances can they be approved” he was still expressing his interpretation of what Catholic doctrine requires.
What Phil Robertson did was altogether different. Robertson was just being crude and hateful when he told a reporter for GQ: “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men. Don’t be deceived (he said paraphrasing Corinthians) neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”
Robertson then went further: “It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”
Not content to confine his tastelessness to gays, Robertson also resurrected the embarrassing minstrel show fixture of the “Happy Negro,” a stock character whose origins go all the way back to Southern slave apologists like George Fitzhugh, who said “the negro slaves of the South are the happiest and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”
Fitzhugh was one of those Southern “fire-eaters” who believed the condition of the Southern slave compared favorably to that of the wage earner in the North since, as he said, slaves were “capital” whose “owners” paid dearly for them. And so “when slaves are worth $1,000 a head they will be cared for and well provided for” – unlike, he inferred, the expendable, exploitable and readily disposable wage slaves of the North.
Brought up-to-date by the likes of Phil Robertson, Fitzhugh’s repulsive idea sounds something like this: “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.”
For the relatively minor consequences he faced for these boorish remarks, Phil Robertson has become a celebrated martyr on the right and their latest cause célèbre. Conservatives have hoisted Robertson up on their shoulders as a cultural icon whose “brave” words are what other right wingers wish they could voice but for one reason or another can’t bring themselves to say out loud.
Nevertheless, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck. And what Phil Robertson said to GQ was anti-gay bigotry, plain and simple, whose open hostility towards these minorities is precisely why conservatives are now retroactively trying to dignify Robertson’s ugly hatefulness by wrapping it in the holy vestments of religious expression and free speech.
But the argument is hollow because Robertson’s fans are no more concerned with free speech than was the Tea Party with debts and deficits as they stood immobile and mute for eight long years while Republicans under George W. Bush doubled both until the Tea Party rose up in spontaneous and righteous anger the moment the American people had the effrontery to elect a black man as their President.
Right wing conservatives are not rallying around Robertson because they are the principled advocates of free speech or dedicated students of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and John Milton’s Areopagitica.
There were no angry outcries from conservatives a decade ago when the Dixie Chicks were being banned from one country music station after another, or having their records burned, once the superstar group said some contrarian things about President Bush and his baseless invasion of Iraq way back in 2003 when such anti-war opposition was unpopular but really mattered.
Country stations pulled the Dixie Chicks after lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience she was “ashamed” that Bush hailed from Texas, where the Chicks are also from.
Soon, station managers were flooded with calls from angry listeners who thought the Chick’s criticism of Bush was “unpatriotic.” One station in Kansas City even held a Dixie “chicken toss” party where listeners were encouraged to dump the group’s tapes, CDs and concert tickets into trash cans.
“We’ve got them off the air for right now,” said Jeff Garrison, program director at KILT in Texas. “People are shocked. They cannot believe Texas’ own have attacked the state and the president.”
When the Dixie Chicks were preparing for their nationwide Top of the World Tour, death threats caused promoters to install metal detectors at the shows. In Dallas, fears for the safety of the group led police to provide an escort from the show to the airport.
A Colorado radio station suspended two of its disc jockeys for playing music by the Dixie Chicks. When the group was nominated for Entertainer of the Year at the Academy of Country Music awards in Las Vegas, host Vince Gill had to remind the booing audience that everyone is entitled to freedom of speech.
Even President Bush weighed in, telling Tom Brokow: “the Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They can say what they want to say. They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out. Freedom is a two-way street.”
Yes, freedom is a two-way street. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion just not their own TV show. People are free to speak their mind and other people are free to retaliate by writing letters, organizing boycotts or taking offensive people off the air.
But what the Dixie Chicks did, it’s important to keep in mind, was criticize President Bush for the political acts he took while in office. Phil Robertson, on the other hand, was merely insulting gays and blacks for being who they are. Then he and his supporters used religion to hide their sin.
The idea that conservatives are civil libertarians who support free speech and diversity is a comic farce in any case, for what conservatives support is not “freedom” but “conformity” to a conservative culture where people have sex in the missionary position with members of the opposite sex or not at all, and where country music groups don’t criticize God-fearing Republican presidents, especially if they are from Texas, for waging wars against the non-Christian infidel.
And if accomplishing this agenda means banning celebrities from the airwaves one minute and then attacking TV networks for doing the same thing to other celebrities the next, then so be it.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, December 26, 2013
“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
“Reality Isn’t So Ducky”: Profit, Not Equal Rights Or Freedom Of Religion, Is The Real Coin Of The Realm
It’s Christmas and a strange white-bearded fellow uttering quack-quack-quack has streaked across the continent, dumping a large sack of something on America’s hearth.
Phil Robertson — millionaire star of “Duck Dynasty” — seems an unlikely antagonist as 2013 wraps up. As all sentient beings know by now, he was suspended from the wildly popular A&E program for comments he made about gays during a recent GQ interview.
Suddenly our nation is consumed anew with impassioned debate about nearly every foundational principle — freedom of speech, religious freedom, civil rights and same-sex marriage.
The last is relatively uncontroversial in some states and most urban areas, but not in rural America where hunters convene — or among fundamentalist Christians, for whom biblical literalism is a virtue — and certainly not among millions of “Duck Dynasty” fans. Needless to say, these three groups overlap considerably.
Robertson isn’t just a megastar in waterfowl world, he is the composite character so loathed by liberals and certain elites who would nigh perish at the thought of close contact with his sort — a white, fundamentalist, Bible-thumping, duck-killing yahoo who somehow missed the civil rights movement, not to mention the New England Enlightenment.
Distilled, Robertson said two things in particular that provoked protests outside the bayou. One, that homosexual acts are sins, which is hardly news among recipients of the Gospel (hate the sin, love the sinner). Two, he said that African Americans he worked with during the Jim Crow era were just fine. “They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues,” he said.
Except, of course, many blacks were singing the blues and had been since about the 19th century when plantation slaves invented the genre while toiling in the Mississippi Delta not far from Robertson’s haunts.
Robertson’s words released an onslaught of fire and brimstone not seen since God unleashed his fury on Sodom. Speaking of which, it is tempting to note that God was rather selective in his outrage back then. Furious with homosexuals, he seemed to have no problem with Lot, whom he saved, when Lot offered his virgin daughters to townsmen who were demanding to “know” the angels hanging with Lot that God had sent to destroy Sodom.
Similarly, sort of, Robertson’s fans didn’t seem to care much about the vile, X-rated imagery he used to make his point to GQ concerning the relative merits of human apertures for sexual gratification. Granted, GQ is read mostly by old teenagers and young adults, but is this really the fellow Christians want instructing America’s camouflaged kiddos?
Robertson’s blunt talk caused a stir not because he was delivering tablets from the burning bush but because he was clearly speaking outside his wheelhouse to the detriment of people whose equal rights — even their very lives — are endangered by such talk. Robertson may “love the sinner,” but you sure can’t tell.
Executives at A&E clearly were banking on hicks acting like hicks, not expressing what they actually think. But then, what did they expect from a Louisiana duck-call whittlin’, part-time preacher, for Pete’s sake?
“Aw, shucks, the more love in the world the better is what I always say” ?
To the greater point, the fact that a healthy, if dwindling, percentage of the country feels helplessly opposed to redefining marriage reveals an existential divide that won’t easily be bridged. Robertson didn’t create it; he exposed it.
He also helped illuminate our persistent confusion about gay rights. South Carolina’s largest newspaper, the State, recently featured two stories back to back — one dealing with “Duck Dynasty” fans protesting Robertson’s indefinite hiatus, the other about Methodists defrocking Frank Schaefer for performing his gay son’s marriage.
One is damned for being anti-gay marriage and the other for being pro — both in the name of the same deity, presumably. So which is it? The Christian, as well as the constitutional, way seems to me the latter. But fundamentalism, regardless of religion, finds refuge in the toxic swamp of moral certitude.
In other near-certainties, Robertson reportedly will be back on the show when it returns in January. With shelves emptied of “Duck Dynasty” paraphernalia by loyal consumers, and A&E facing boycott threats, there’s too much money at stake.
Profit, not equal rights or freedom of religion or any of the other high-minded principles we seize to bolster our selective outrage, is the real coin of the realm. And, as if you didn’t know, it quacks like a duck.
By: Kathleen Parker, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 24, 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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