Since you’ve all been waiting for my two cents on the #DuckDrama…

It was so great to fast from my blog over Advent. The only thing I regret about it is that I was offline when the Duck Drama hit the fan so I didn’t get to ride the tidal wave to a bazillion hits like all the other eager bloggers (all of whom opened with obligatory apologies for writing about it). I presume that everything I have to say has already been said, but since we’re traveling today, I needed a topic that didn’t require a lot of critical thinking, so here goes.

1) I hope A&E is doing this to increase the ratings when Phil comes back

If you’re going to make a reality show in which the selling point is that it’s about Louisiana rednecks, then it’s ridiculous/hypocritical/a marketing disaster to suspend the star of the show for talking like a Louisiana redneck, especially when your cult following for the show is a population that worships redneck culture. It only makes sense if it’s a cynical ploy to drive up the ratings even further, kind of like when Achy Breaky Heart’s daughter twerked and stuck her tongue six inches out of her mouth to piss everybody off so she could sell a bazillion records.

2) Why did you have to give the culture warriors new life through manufactured martyrdom?

I really wish that some television network would buck the trend of firing people when the PC piranhas start to circle in the media. The way to handle bigotry is to engage it, not turn it into a “freedom of speech” issue by silencing it. It would have been a much greater service to the LGBT community if A&E had decided instead to send some gay duck hunters down to Louisiana to hang out with Phil so that the Duck Drama fanatics could judge for themselves whether gay people are in fact “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice… envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness… gossips, slanderers, God-haters,insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (Romans 1:29-31). Because if they aren’t all of those things, then maybe St. Paul was talking about a different aspect of 1st century pagan aristocrat sexuality that went “against nature.”

3) Phil Robertson has a personally uncostly definition of sin

When Phil made his comments about homosexuality, it wasn’t in response to a question about homosexuality. It was after being asked to define sin in general. He said,“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.” In other words, sin is other peoples’ sexually deviant behavior, not anything that Phil would ever do. His understanding of sin is completely uncostly to him. Phil’s comment reveals the function that homosexuality has in grassroots conservative evangelical culture. Making sin about other peoples’ sexuality gives you a means of being “holy” by talking tough about other peoples’ behavior without changing anything about the way you behave. Then you can be conspicuously “self-sacrificial” without lifting a finger.

4) Phil’s idyllic cotton-picking memories are part of the story

Phil should be commended for setting things straight once and for all that “entitlement” and “welfare” are code words for the civil rights movement. It’s pretty shocking to me to hear someone in 2013 openly taking a pro-segregationist position and suggesting that black people stopped being humble, godly, etc, as a result of civil rights. And yet, it should be said that those of us who were born after America supposedly “stopped being racist” in the 70’s or later have inherited an abominably oversimplified narrative about the relations between races in which all white people were despicably racist before 1970 but then a giant reset button got magically hit and everyone was healed instantaneously of their racism so that the past could be completely left behind us and there would be no need to bring it up ever again. Phil’s comments remind us that racism has always been a systemic sin in the midst of which personal relationships were a lot more complicated. America pre-1970 (or 1990 or whenever you put the magic reset button in our history) was not a categorically different world than the world we live in today. I imagine that Phil Robertson had genuine friendships with the black people he shared the cotton fields with; they probably told jokes together and shared snacks. That part of the story doesn’t get wiped out by the systemic racism that existed when Phil was picking cotton and continues to exist today. Conversely, Phil’s idyllic memories of cotton-picking don’t get to negate the evil that happened to black people.