Phil Robertson's America

[ProSense]

Phil Robertson's America

The Duck Dynasty star's warped vision of civil-rights history feeds his warped view of today's gay-rights struggle.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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That is Robertson responding to a reporter's question about life in Louisiana, before the civil-rights movement. I am sure Robertson did see plenty of black people who were singing and happy. And I am also sure that very few black people approached Robertson to complain about "doggone white people."

I have some idea why:

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The black people who Phil Robertson knew were warred upon. If they valued their lives, and the lives of their families, the last thing they would have done was voiced a complaint about "white people" to a man like Robertson. Ignorance is no great sin and one can forgive the good-natured white person for not knowing how all that cannibal sausage was truly made. But having been presented with a set of facts, Robertson's response is to cite "welfare" and "entitlement" as the true culprits.

The belief that black people were at their best when they were being hunted down like dogs for the sin of insisting on citizenship is a persistent strain of thought in this country. This belief reflects the inability to cope with an America that is, at least rhetorically, committed to equality. One can clearly see the line from this kind of thinking to a rejection of the civil-rights movement of our age:

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,” [Robertson] says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. 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.

This is not just ignorance; it is a willful retreat into myth. And we must have the intellectual courage and moral strength to follow the myth through. If swindlers, goat-fuckers, and gay men are really all the same—disinherited from the kingdom of God—why not treat them the same? How does one argue that a man who is disfavored by the Discerner of All Things, should not be shamed, should not jeered, should not be stoned, should not be lynched in the street?

- more -

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/phil-robertsons-america/282555/

‘Duck Dynasty’ and Quackery
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/opinion/blow-duck-dynasty-and-quackery.html

"My Facebook Note Re: Phil Robertson"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024206915

[Cirque du So-What]

1. The Robertsons of this world

would take that rhetorical question about why swindlers, goat-fuckers & gay men are not all treated the same and say, 'why not, indeed?' They harbor fantasies of a society where public stonings occur regularly and swiftly for even the most minor infractions of gawd's laws.

[ProSense]

2. Kick! n/t