"'Duck Dynasty' was a simple entertainment, but it was also a complicated mash-up of several of the most popular TV genres of its time."

"It had some connection to 'hicksploitation' reality shows like 'Here Comes Honey Boo Boo' and to series like 'Deadliest Catch' that celebrated people who worked with their hands. It also had the structure and beats of a mockumentary sitcom. Like 'Modern Family,' it often ended with voice-overs summing up the episode’s themes and lessons.... Like 'The Office,' it structured stories around staffers goofing around the warehouse and cooking up schemes like flooding the loading dock to create a duck pond. But there was a key difference.... It was about work, family and faith — a typical episode would close with a prayer over a meal.... 'Duck Dynasty' was affectionate for backwoods ways and tradition.... It gave the patriarch Phil plenty of airtime to sermonize about manhood and encourage his grandsons to marry 'a meek, gentle, kind-spirited country girl.'.... Phil’s opinions came out more blatantly and less telegenically, however, in a 2013 GQ interview, in which he called gay sex a sin and insisted that southern Black farm laborers were happy in Jim Crow-era Louisiana. ... A&E suspended him from the series.The punishment seemed, at the time, like the affirmation of a new cultural order.... The Trump 2016 campaign was in many ways a successful appeal to voters like Phil Robertson, who believed that their views were being silenced, their icons canceled, their traditions trampled, their beliefs insulted.... [Trump] promised... to restore the rich and meaningful lifestyle of their ancestors...."

From "'Duck Dynasty' Is Coming Back to a Changed America/The family reality comedy, being revived on A&E, was a lighthearted entertainment — that anticipated a decade’s worth of cultural politics." (NYT).

The article is about the revival of the show. Phil Robertson does not appear in it, and, as we talked about here, he died a few days ago. 

"In a lot of ways, I was withdrawing from mainstream society. I was trying to drop back about two centuries to become an eighteenth-century man..."

"... who relied on hunting and fishing for his livelihood. But I was living in the twentieth century, and everything was constantly changing around me.... I’ve always believed that if we did what was morally and ethically right, while continuing to steadfastly believe in what we were doing, we’d end up okay in the end.... Now, I’m not a man of great intellectual depth, but it sounds to me like God Almighty has said we can pretty much rack and stack anything that swims, flies, or walks, which I consider orders from headquarters.... After studying several political parties to find out what they believe and stand for, I decided my political ideology was more in line with the Republicans. I definitely was no Democrat—that’s for sure—but I don’t really consider myself one or the other. I’m more of a Christocrat, someone who honors our founding fathers and pays them homage for being godly men at a time when wickedness was all over the world. Our founding fathers started this country and built it on God and His Word, and this country sure would be a better place to live and raise our children if we still followed their ideals and beliefs."

Highlights I selected from a book I read and blogged 11 years ago, retrieved this morning on seeing the obituary of the author. Do you recognize the voice?

"Althouse also wrote a blog post about how free speech is much, much more than just a 1st Amendment protection."

"I've tried twice in earnest to find it, but the 'free speech' tags are endless," wrote Browndog in in the comments to yesterday's post about Facebook. That post ended with these 2 questions, "What about the freedom of speech of users of Facebook? Is Facebook unduly censoring speech based on political viewpoint?"

In that post, I linked to a post of mine from March 27, 2011 — "The Bob Wright/Ann Althouse email exchange about what free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News" — so that shouldn't be what Browndog means. There I said:

Back on February 2, I wrote “When did the left turn against free speech?” and used some clips from a Bloggingheads I did with Bob Wright, in which I talked about free speech values and rejected Bob's attempt to restrict the idea of free speech to the constitutional right to free speech, which only deals with the problem of government restrictions on speech. The text of my post, however, doesn't restate our disagreement about the meaning of the term, and Bob emailed me to complain. And then last Friday, I did another Bloggingheads, and Bob brought up his beef about the definition of the term again. So I invited him to give me permission to publish the whole email exchange, and he agreed, so here goes...

That's a long post, but I think this is closest to what Browndog was looking for:

My standard free speech answer is going to be in favor of expression, access to expression, and more speech, not repression of speech and not cutting off conversations that are still in play because they offend some other people who think the conversation should have already ended....

So if Google or Facebook, private corporations, took steps to squelch free speech[,] that would just not even make sense to you as a concept because they can't affect free speech since they are not the government? If people organized and regularly showed up at events to shout down speakers they disapproved of, it would be incoherent to urge them to respect free speech[?]...

As for the right to free speech, the First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." Just on that text alone, you can see that there are 2 different things "the freedom of speech" and the specific direction to Congress not to abridge it. Now, if you say freedom of speech is nothing more than the direction to government not to abridge the freedom of speech, try to picture what the text would need to be: "Congress shall make no law... abridging Congress's proscription against abridging the freedom of speech" which would make no sense at all. The freedom of speech is something which we enjoy, and the Constitution bars Congress's interference with it.

Maybe that is what Browndog had in mind, but I looked through the archive. (My method was to click on the Facebook tag, then search the page for "free.") Here's what I came up with, from oldest to newest:

January 3, 2009: There was Facebook group called "I Wonder How Quickly I Can Find 1,000,000 People Who Support Israel" that, noting that the First Amendment only limits government, pressured Facebook to enforce its own Terms of Use that barred "any content that we deem to be harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, fraudulent, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable." I said:

Sorry. My free speech values extend a lot farther than what's protected by the First Amendment. And I think Facebook's Terms of Use are horrifyingly restrictive. Censoring everything "hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable"? Ridiculous! I'd rather join a Facebook group called "Facebook's Terms of Use Are an Affront to Free Speech."

January 16, 2015: "After the [Paris] massacre, Mark Zuckerberg justifies Facebook censorship":

"It wasn’t just a terrorist attack about just trying to do some damage and make people afraid and hurt people. This was specifically about people’s freedom of expression and ability to say what they want. That really gets to the core of what Facebook and the internet are, I think, and what we’re all here to do. We really stand up and try to make it so that everyone can have as much of a voice as possible,” [Zuckerberg] said....

When I started to read Zuckerberg's remarks, I thought they were going to go somewhere else. I thought he was going to say that by creating a more friendly environment within Facebook, more people would be encouraged to join and participate, and that would ultimately provide more speech for more people. The nasty, ugly speech would be silenced, but it could go elsewhere, and he was trying to facilitate speech by those who feel intimated or bullied or offended by the speech of others. But Zuckerberg is only justifying Facebook censorship as a response to repression coming from foreign governments.

April 16, 2016: "Internal poll at Facebook: 'What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?'"

It is true that Facebook would be protected by the First Amendment, even as it screwed with the freedom of speech of over a billion human beings. What's tremendously important here is to maintain pressure on Facebook to respect our freedom. We don't have a legal right to assert against Facebook, but that is absolutely not a reason to give up and let Facebook do what it wants to repress speech. We have moral, political, social, and economic power, and we should assert it. We assert it through — of all things — speech. It can be very effective... which is why we care about free speech in the first place. Even where you don't have a legal right, as long as you are still speaking, you have the power of speech, and the urge to repress it occurs because the speech is effective. The trick is to use speech to convince the would-be repressers not to repress speech.

November 15, 2016: "Facebook, don't even try to censor fake news. You can't draw that line, and you shouldn't want to":

I absolutely do not trust Facebook to decide what's fake and what's not fake, so I'm with Zuckerberg here... The chance that such a power would be used in a politically biased way is approximately 100%. I don't know how much Zuckerberg is really committed to the freedom of speech, but I think he knows if Facebook started deeming some political stories "fake" and taking action against them, Facebook would be accused of bias and censorship and it wouldn't be good for Facebook, the business.... Those of us who care about freedom of speech should try to make it vividly apparent to the people of Facebook that censorship will hurt them economically. You can't trust them to believe in freedom of speech. They've already got a heated-up, self-righteous band of insiders who think censorship is the cutting edge.

ADDED: I realize that my search method left out everything that didn't include Facebook, which is probably a lot. One reader emailed to point me to...

Camille Paglia says the Duck Dynasty debate really is about freedom of speech.

She said:

"I speak with authority here because I was openly gay before the 'Stonewall Rebellion,' when it cost you something to be so... And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech. In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as they have the right to support homosexuality — as I 100 percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right to religious freedom there … to express yourself in a magazine in an interview -– this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades. It's the whole legacy of the free speech 1960's that have been lost by my own party."

Meanwhile, some liberals are making the predictable narrowly legalistic point that freedom of speech has only to do with rights held against the government. This is a point I've strongly objected to over the years, most obviously, in debating the liberal Bob Wright (see "When did the left turn against freedom of speech?" and "[W]hat free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News"). Why is the left taking the narrow view of the concept of freedom? It's a general principle, not something you save for your friends. Like Paglia, I remember the broad 1960s era commitment to free speech. There was a special zeal to protect those who said outrageous things. Today, we're back to the kind of repression that in the 60s seemed to belong to the 1950s. What the hell happened?

My favorite part of this NYT article about the political pattern to the popularity of various TV shows.

They put a special arrow with a "Madison, WI" label on the "Daily Show" map:



Here's the whole article, "‘Duck Dynasty’ vs. ‘Modern Family’/50 Maps of the U.S. Cultural Divide/Americans have been clustering themselves into cultural bubbles just as they have clustered in political bubbles. Their TV preferences confirm that."

The dot that is Madison, Wisconsin shows up in all the maps, but somehow it's the "Daily Show" one that made the NYT feel a special need to point at us.

I think the NYT is looking for ways to serve readers who are agonizing in the aftermath of the election, and pop-culture-focused political articles may seem helpful in moving them through the stages of grief.

Here's the schedule for the GOP convention.

Here. Are you going to watch much of it? I've set the DVR to record it. I hope to find at least some of it bloggable.

Each day has a theme, expressed in the form of the campaign slogan with the word "great" replaced by another simple word, safe/work/first/one*:

Monday: Make America Safe Again....

Tuesday: Make America Work Again....

Wednesday: Make America First Again....

Thursday: Make America One Again....

The first speaker on the first night is... who else?... Willie Robertson, the star of "Duck Dynasty."

I couldn't figure out who, if anyone, is the "keynote" speaker.
__________________________

* Maybe Trump has the same idea as Randall Munroe, author of "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words" ("In Thing Explainer, he uses... only the thousand (or, rather, 'ten hundred') most common words to provide simple explanations for some of the most interesting stuff there is....").

"Bobby Jindal’s Plan To Stop Being A Punchline And Actually Win."

"[O]ne Jindal adviser noted that their candidate has something none of his rivals have: the Duck Dynasty endorsement...."

The background photo on Jindal’s Twitter feed shows him and his family posing with the Robertsons. To many in the political class, Jindal’s close alliance with a cast of goofy reality TV stars scans as pandering. But a senior adviser to the candidate pointed out that the show has been tremendously popular with the sort of religious conservatives who dominate the Iowa caucuses, and that Willie’s endorsement could be a real selling point....

"It was the first time I've had to hide a New Yorker post from my Facebook feed. Blech."

Says a commenter at Television Without Pity, responding to another commenter who said:

Wow, I don't think I can watch any more of this.

This, being the HBO series "Girls."

I hate the nudity and everything else. And, yes, I am shallow and I don't enjoy [Lena] Dunham's very odd body and the unnecessary reveals. And I HATE those freaking tattoos. That's part of the problem when she dresses up for something like the Globes. The dress was hideous on her and those tats were gross as always. The nudity for no reason? Like when they stopped to hike?...  Hannah lies down on the ground and we -- lucky lucky us -- can see up her skirt. Why? It's distracting and unattractive and took me out of the weird scene because I was trying to figure out if she had underwear on or not. And why her ass was hanging out at all.

Here's the New Yorker item with the photograph of Hannah in the is-she-wearing-underpants position that needed to be hidden in the TWoP commenter's Facebook feed. The New Yorker writer, Sasha Weiss, describing the relevant scene in episode 2 of the new season, says:

I read Phil Robertson's autobiography.

1. Here, you can buy it on Amazon, as I did.

2. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I know that the GQ article calls it "a ghostwritten book he says he has never read." I assume he talked to the ghostwriter and didn't check the ghost's work by sitting down and reading through the book. I'd be interested to know what books Phil does read. He reads the Bible. I got that. Phil purports to be such a godly man that I feel entitled to believe the book is accurate, but it has the feeling of PR, and I took it in that spirit.

3. My favorite part of the book was the first chapter, his boyhood, especially all the stuff about living off the land:

"10 signs that religious fundamentalism is going down" — a badly headlined item at Salon.

Badly headlined because "going down" is only intended to mean in decline, but it has (presumably unintended) alternative meanings: 1. the violent sense, implying that attackers are taking it down (as in the phrase "You're going down"), and thus evincing dicey hostility, and 2. the sexual sense, which is silly, but the photo under the headline is of Phil Robertson — famous for graphically expressing his preference for classic penis-in-the-vagina sex — so that mental detour is easier than usual.

Anyway... it's a listicle at Salon, compiled, I suppose, to cheer up the kind of people who hope religion will die out or at least turn into something not fundamental, something bland and pliable. This deathwatch has gone on for an awfully long time. From the debate in the House of Representatives over the Bill of Rights:

Mr. Scott objected to the clause in the sixth amendment, "No person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms."... There are many sects I know, who are religiously scrupulous in this respect; I do not mean to deprive them of any indulgence the law affords; my design is to guard against those who are of no religion. It has been urged that religion is on the decline; if so, the argument is more strong in my favor, for when the time comes that religion shall be discarded, the generality of persons will have recourse to these pretexts to get excused from bearing arms.

When the time comes that religion shall be discarded... When did he imagine that time to be? I doubt if Valerie Tarico, the listicle author at Salon, is any more prescient than was Congressman Thomas Scott in 1789.

ADDED: Damn the headline writer for making me remember that awful, old Bruce Springsteen song "I'm Goin' Down" ("I'm sick and tired of you setting me up/Setting me up just to knock-a knock-a knock-a me down/Down, down, down/'m going down, down, down, down...").

"A&E messed with the wrong redneck... Phil has agreed to return, but he’s already working on getting out [of] their contracts."

"He’s confident lawyers can find a loophole and get them out of any long-term commitments."

"Phil wants to use his company name Duck Commander as the title for an entirely new show that they can produce themselves and be in control of what goes on."

"Look, you wait until they get to be 20-years-old, the only picking that’s going to take place is your pocket."

"You got to marry these girls when they are about 15 or 16, they’ll pick your ducks. You need to check with mom and dad about that of course."

So said Phil Robertson — back in the news, not because he said something edgy again, but because his antagonists dug up a 5-year old video. It took me a while to grasp that "pick your ducks" means pluck the ducks that you bring home (and not choosing which ducks to shoot). Robertson, we're told in the linked article, married his wife in 1966 when she was 16 (and he was 20). They'd been dating since she was 14 (and he was 18).

This material is right there in Phil Robertson's autobiography, "Happy, Happy, Happy," which has been out since last May. I have it in my Kindle. At page 52:

Miss Kay was the perfect woman for me. I was sixteen and she was fifteen when we were married. Nowadays some people might frown on people getting married that young, but I knew that if you married a woman when she was fifteen, she would pluck your ducks. If you waited until she was twenty, she would only pick your pockets. Now, that’s a joke, and a lot of people seem to laugh at it, but there is a certain amount of truth in it. If you can find a nice, pretty country girl who can cook and carries her Bible, now, there’s a woman. She might even be ugly, but if she cooks squirrels and dumplings, then that’s the woman you go after.

Seems like he's been telling that pluck-a-duck joke for a long time. Anyway, how old was Phil when he married Kay and how old was she? The stories in the news and in the autobiography don't match. And what was the law in Louisiana at the time? I think (looking casually on line at what the law is today) that if you're under 18, you need both parents' consent, and if you're under 16, you need a court order.

A page later in the autobiography, Robertson quotes the New Testament (1 Peter 3: 1–6): "Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands...."

You have to go to the Bible yourself if you want to get the significance of "in the same way." The antecedent is not about husbands submitting to their wives but servants submitting to their masters ("not only to the kind and gentle but also to the overbearing"). But the text goes on to tell husbands what to do: "live considerately with your wives, bestowing honor on the woman as the weaker sex." But that's not quoted in Robertson's book. His Biblical snippet goes on to counsel against "outward adornment" and in favor of the beauty of a woman's "inner self," manifested as "a gentle and quiet spirit." And Robertson tells us that's exactly what Miss Kay is. She doesn't wear much makeup, and she's beautiful "on the inside and the outside."

Kay and I always were the perfect match. I was our high school quarterback, and she was a cheerleader. 

Speaking of gentle, quiet beauty on the inside, the quarterback goes for the cheerleader. We're told that she sought him out, and they dated until duck season, when he decided that he was going to spend all his free time hunting and that Kay couldn't go along, because "Women are a lot like ducks— they don’t like mud on their butts. I figured she would just get in the way." But then Kay's father died suddenly, when she was only 14, so he "went to her daddy’s funeral, and we made eye contact," and he "asked her out a few weeks later, and we’ve been together ever since." And:

My qualms about taking Kay into the woods were quickly relieved. And Kay wasn’t only a spectator. She helped catch baitfish, gather worms, hook them onto trotlines, and of course, pick ducks by plucking their feathers to prepare them for cooking. You know you have a good woman when you return home from a hunt and she’s standing on the front porch, yelling, “Did y’all get anything?” Before I repented, Kay also drove my getaway car when I was hunting out of season. I always knew my woman was waiting for me on the other side of the woods if I got into trouble.

The last page of the book is "A Note From Kay," in which she describes her childhood dreams of the  man she would marry.

What I didn’t know when I found the man who filled my dreams was that I had found a diamond in the rough.

Which is a way to say, he did not fit those dreams, not for a long time.

One of the great tragedies I see is people not putting every effort into the foundation of their marriage. My grandmother told me that it’s one man and one woman for life and that your marriage is worth fighting for. We had a few hard and bumpy years, but prayer, patience, and some suffering and hope — plus remembering an old lady’s words — were what got me through the difficult times. We have given it our all for our marriage and family, and my dreams did come true.

What do we want to say about high school sweethearts marrying (in a world where most of us seem to accept them having sexual intercourse)? She loses her father and her boyfriend closes in on her, limiting her life choices and not really ready to be a man and treat her right. But she sticks to the path she chose, and she makes good, the way wives have traditionally done, and few young women are inclined to do these days.

Here's how Slate's Amanda Marcotte presents the story: "Phil Robertson Says Girls Should Be Married Off at '15 or 16.'" The headline is bad, because "married off" expresses the point of view of the parents of a young woman. Robertson spoke from the perspective of a man looking for a wife who will treat him well. Marcotte goes on to speak from this perspective, but she gets that wrong by assuming he was addressing older men: "His advice for a happy marriage is to make like R. Kelly and hang out in high-school parking lots."

Should 2 teenagers — close in age — marry? We've drifted toward no, I think, mostly because we accept sex outside of marriage, which we do in large part because of birth control (and abortion) and the various sexual practices that don't lead to pregnancy, including the anal sex that we know Phil Robertson can't get his mind around. Before we sneer at the idea that teenagers should marry, we need to be honest about what we are accepting.

"I’m a patriot and a Christian... But now it’s gotten to where I’m some kind of nut or Bible beater."

Writes Phil Robertson in his recently published book, "Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander," noting that he's just following "the principles on which the United States was built... right there with our founding fathers."

What in the world ever happened to the United States of America, folks? Our country is so different from the nation that was founded more than two hundred years ago. I’m absolutely convinced that the reason America went so far and so fast is that our founders were God-fearing men. It was godly from the start. Our founding fathers fled the wickedness of Europe and came to America to build a nation built on principles, morals, and their beliefs in Jesus Christ. They drew upon their faith and biblical ideals to actually construct the framing documents of our great country.

That's very close to the end of the book, the third and second to the last paragraphs (before the afterword). (The last paragraph states his resolution to keep "spreading God’s Word...  reading Scripture and quotes, carrying his Bible, and blowing duck calls to crowds.")

I bought the book (on Kindle) because I wanted to be able to search the text, and the first thing I searched for was "homosexual" and "gay" to see if Robertson had an unhealthy fixation on the sexual sins that don't tempt him, and I can report that neither word appears in the text. So I searched for "sex" — a search that will pick up all words containing the sequence of letters "sex" — and found 7 occurrences.

The first 2 are about the sex of ducks — in the sense of whether a given duck happens to be male or female. The third is some joking about how he felt after his wife compelled him to witness her giving birth (to their 4th child, the first and only birth he attended): "I knew right then that my sex life was over — although I somehow managed to get over my concerns thirty days later!"

The final 3 appear immediately before the passages quoted above, and they are all in the context of concern not so much about sexual sin, but about sexually transmitted diseases.

This, the second-to-the-last page of the book begins with "I’m extremely worried about our country’s youth." Robertson says his "greatest fear is for one of my grandchildren to come up and tell me they have herpes," and asks "Don’t you think it a little ironic that what follows sexual immorality is herpes, chlamydia, AIDS, syphilis, and gonorrhea?"  

Ironic? He sees irony because sex is so much "fun," so why should it "bring these horrible diseases upon us" and why haven't doctors been able to cure them all? He concludes that the diseases are "the consequences of disobeying the Almighty."

Robertson presents disease as God's way of enforcing his rules about sex:

Look, you’re married to a woman and she doesn’t have AIDS, chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhea, or any of the rest of them. Here’s the good news: you don’t have it and she doesn’t have it. Guess who is never going to get it if you keep your sex right there? The only way it can be transmitted to you or your spouse is if you go out and disobey what the Almighty says. When it’s one woman and one man, you won’t catch this stuff. 

Interestingly, homosexuality doesn't even seem to be on Robertson's radar, since a same-sex couple, beginning disease-free and keeping monogamous, would enjoy the same health benefit. If we're to reason about God from looking at where he allows disease to take root — Robertson's idea, not mine — then God blesses gay marriage.

But if you disobey God, His wrath will be poured out upon you. It’s not a coincidence that horrible diseases follow immoral conduct — it’s the consequences that follow when you break God’s laws. 

This is horrible theology. Robertson isn't inclined to think too deeply as he mixes religion and health. How would he explain children getting cancer? Monogamy may be good religion and, simultaneously, good for your health, but that doesn't establish that good health is evidence that God approves of your behavior. People do not have bad health in proportion to their sinfulness, and one can think of behavior that isn't particularly virtuous that would be good for fending off disease, notably avoiding human contact.

Finally, Robertson expresses sorrow over his own past, "running with the depraved crowd," part of a generation that "gave itself over to sinful desires and sexual impurities," and that sets up the final page, calling the next generation to godliness, without mentioning sex again and tying the enterprise of religion to the founding of the United States of America. It's a surprisingly quick trip from the worrying about disease to the beliefs of the Founders.

Robertson obviously would like young people to be religious and, to him, religion demands sexual purity, but he seems to think disease-avoidance belongs in the argument.

What if there were no sexually transmitted diseases (or if the doctors did figure out how to cure them all)? I think Robertson would still want everyone to adhere to monogamy. But Robertson remembers how he behaved when he was young. He enjoyed his sexual fun, and he seems to know that young people want that too. Why not sin as he did and then, as he did, come to Jesus only when raging desire wanes?

Robertson should have a better answer than the scariness of diseases and the notion that God smites us in this life with disease.

***

Getting an Amazon link for Robertson's book, I ran into more "Duck Dynasty" books than I wanted to count. There's "Si-cology 1: Tales and Wisdom from Duck Dynasty's Favorite Uncle," "The Duck Commander Family: How Faith, Family, and Ducks Built a Dynasty," "The Duck Commander Devotional," "Miss Kay's Duck Commander Kitchen: Faith, Family, and Food--Bringing Our Home to Your Table," etc. This is a publishing empire as well as a reality TV empire. Empire... dynasty... they mean to rule.

IN THE COMMENTS: NorthOfTheOneOhOne takes me to task for attributing the reasoning in Phil Robertson's book to Phil Robertson:

Go read the GQ interview again. It specifically mentions that Phil says he's never read his own autobiography. No doubt it's based on his rather rambling philosophy of things. I don't envy the ghostwriter, though. 

In fact, I had never read the GQ article in full, so I checked it out. It says:

According to Phil’s autobiography — a ghostwritten book he says he has never read — he spent his days after Tech doing odd jobs and his evenings getting drunk, chasing tail, and swallowing diet pills and black mollies, a form of medicinal speed. In his midtwenties, already married with three sons, a piss-drunk Robertson kicked his family out of the house. “I’m sick of you,” he told his wife, Kay. But Robertson soon realized the error of his ways, begged Kay to come back, and turned over his life to Jesus Christ.

So what does this mean that the GQ author says that Robertson says he's never read the book? Assuming Robertson really said that and wasn't lying, I'd guess that it means that Robertson mostly did interviews and provided scraps of writing to the person who put the book text together and that Robertson has never taken the trouble to sit down and read it through. So am I wasting my time taking the text seriously? If Robertson isn't responsible for the text, he's a party to a scam, which doesn't seem too godly.

A&E brings Phil Robertson back into its good graces.

This was all so very predictable, but here's the statement and it's headlining at Drudge, so, after all our discussions of the topic, I feel I must treat it as news.

As a global media content company, A&E Networks' core values are centered around creativity, inclusion and mutual respect. We believe it is a privilege for our brands to be invited into people's homes, and we operate with a strong sense of integrity and deep commitment to these principles.

That is why we reacted so quickly and strongly to a recent interview with Phil Robertson. While Phil's comments made in the interview reflect his personal views based on his own beliefs and his own personal journey, he and his family have publicly stated they regret the "coarse language" he used and the misinterpretation of his core beliefs based only on the article. He also made it clear he would "never incite or encourage hate." We at A&E Networks expressed our disappointment with his statements in the article and reiterate that they are not views we hold.

But Duck Dynasty is not a show about one man's views. It resonates with a large audience because it is a show about family… a family that America has come to love. As you might have seen in many episodes, they come together to reflect and pray for unity, tolerance and forgiveness. These are three values that we at A&E Networks also feel strongly about.

So after discussions with the Robertson family, as well as consulting with numerous advocacy groups, A&E has decided to resume filming Duck Dynasty later this spring with the entire Robertson family.

We will also use this moment to launch a national public service campaign (PSA) promoting unity, tolerance and acceptance among all people, a message that supports our core values as a company and the values found in Duck Dynasty. These PSAs will air across our entire portfolio.

That's terribly carefully worded. I'm sure they worked very hard on that.

Mark Steyn writes about "de-normalizing" — being put "beyond the pale of polite society and mainstream culture."

And he's sorry his editor at National Review "does not grasp the stakes" in the "Duck Dynasty" flap.

Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point — that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group... decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal.

Via Power Line, which says:

As to the terms Steyn used, I understand [National Review editor, Jason Lee] Steorts’ point. I too would have liked the column better without the unfunny Rat Pack joke. And I agree with Steorts that courteous disagreement, devoid of insults, is usually preferable to lack of courtesy, even when one is disagreeing with the dangerous and the uncivil.

The point of the Rat Pack joke — “How do you make a fruit cordial?”/ “Be nice to him.” — wasn't that it's funny. It's that not too long ago junk like that was the norm. It was probably considered sweet, gentle and even gay-friendly. Steyn is paying attention to how cultural norms change. This is something I've been talking about too, and I am confounded by what a hard time people have understanding this subject. (Read my posts and the response in the comments here and here.)

A&E celebrates Christmas by showing 25 episodes in a row of "Duck Dynasty."

Replete with the supposedly on-the-outs Phil Robertson.

“I think, honestly, it’s A&E trying to play both sides of the coin,” [said Cate Meighan, senior writer for Celeb Dirty Laundry]. “They’ve come out and not supported Phil’s statements… however they’re also looking at the backlash from the fans, and they have a huge amount of backlash from the fans... It is really a money thing... You’re going to have the same people tuning into ‘Duck Dynasty’ that always have and the same people not watching that always have.”

She said at the end of the day, the series will likely continue if the advertisers continue rush to air ads during the series.... “Unfortunately people are secondary,” she said. “At the end of every single thing that we see it’s about the money and the advertising.”

Oh, come on, Cate. Corporations are people too. So it's "a money thing"? Who but people care about money? People invented money just as people invented language and getting offended at language, and people invented corporations to channel money and language and offense. And entertainment. Arts and entertainment.

Peace on earth, good will toward people of all entertainment orientations.

L.A. Times columnist connects Gov. Scott Walker to Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson.

There must be a way to do that, right?

Like the “Duck Dynasty” dispute, or the recent fight over renaming a Florida school honoring a founder of the KKK, the Wisconsin fight raises the question of among some people as to whether there is a blanket protection of speech, even when it is hateful to some people....

The Wisconsin law, signed by Walker,  amends a 2010 state law that required Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction to hold a hearing on a school's race-based nickname if the agency received a single complaint. The 2010 law placed the burden on the school district of proving the nickname wasn't discriminatory.

Kathy Griffin tweets a graphic, comparing Phil Robertson and Matthew Shepard — not a victim/victim.

pic.twitter.com/5nGDM1FxWb
— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) December 23, 2013

Twitchy decries the comparison mainly on the theory that Robertson committed no act of violence against gay people and also observing that "the murder of Matthew Shepard... might not have had anything to do with Shepard being gay after all, but rather with drugs."

Here's the book that came out last September examining that evidence that the murder wasn't about homosexuality but crystal meth: "The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard."

But let's take this a step deeper and compare the repression of free speech and the use of physical violence to control and oppress people. Murder — especially torture murder, like Shepard's — is a terrible crime. Is it even worse if it is a hate crime — that is, if the victim is chosen because he belongs to a group toward which the murderer feels hate? The reason it is considered worse is because of what it does to the minds of other members of the group.

We all fear crime, and if there is a lot of murder going on, it erodes our sense of well-being and may inhibit our freedom to move around town. But when the crime is hate crime, it has a disparate effect on the minds of the people, so that some are constrained and afraid more than others. That matters! In fact, spreading a false belief that a murder is a hate crime also imposes that disparate burden on members of the group that was supposedly targeted.

Hate speech similarly affects the minds of the members of the group against whom hate has been expressed, and it can produce the same kind of fear of violence that is caused by a report of a hate crime. Now, there is hate speech and there is hate speech. Think of the most virulent hate speech, and you should see how powerful it is, how justified and painful the fear is. In extreme cases, members of the targeted group should take alarm and even flee in terror. A purveyor of hate speech need not commit an act of violence to create a fear of violence. He might inspire others to commit those acts of violence, and even if he doesn't, the threat of violence alone has an effect. False reports of hate speech work the same harm.

In the set of statements that could be characterized as hate speech, what Phil Robertson said was not that bad. Many would argue for a narrow definition of hate speech such that what Phil Robertson said would not be in the set at all. Defining the category very broadly is a political and rhetorical move, and it isn't always effective. At some point — and perhaps with Robertson, we've hit that point — you're being too repressive about what can be said on issues about which decent people are still debating, and it would be better to hear each other out and remain on speaking terms.

There is more good to be achieved by talking to each other and not shunning than by treating another human being as toxic. In fact, to treat another person as toxic is to become hateful yourself. It's better to let the conversation flow, and if you really think your ideas are good, why switch to other tactics? What's the emergency? Especially when your cause — like gay rights — is for greater human freedom, you ought to resist becoming a force of repression.

Since making his controversial remark, Phil Robertson has put out the message that as a Christian he loves everyone. Love speech is the opposite of hate speech, and it has so much more to do with Christianity than the reviling of sin in the earlier remark. He wants to speak against sin, but it's a problem when you aim a remark at a kind of person who has, over the years — over the millennia — felt a threat of violence and the burden of ostracism. I think Robertson knows that.

That's what I want to say in this conversation that I think should flow on. The love is in the conversation. The conversation is an independent good, even if we never agree.

Come on, haters. Show the love.

It's Christmas Eve.

On the "Duck Dynasty" flap, Mike Huckabee is opposing and fomenting the squelching of anti-gay speech.

He said:

"I think it's come to a point in our culture where political correctness has made it so if you want to take a point of view that is traditional, that holds to a steadfast, old-fashioned biblical, Christian values - which are also, by the way, values of traditional Judaism and even Islam - and somehow you're just supposed to shut up and keep that to yourself."

Huckabee pointed to a "new level of bullying on the part of these militant activist groups,” as reason for Robertson's suspension by A&E, referring to groups like the Human Rights Campaign, which urged the network to suspend the star.

But Huckabee conceded that Robertson's comments would have been "more appropriate for the duck woods than it would be for the pages of a major news magazine."

So Huckabee is part of moving the culture to the very point that he's observing that it's come to. There really are things you don't say in mixed company, and it's long been part of the culture to refrain from voicing religious views that make other people uncomfortable. In Christianity, there are many many sins, and it's not socially acceptable to talk about all of them openly and indiscriminately.

If you don't believe me, here's an experiment you can do over the next 3 days. Whenever you find yourself in a conversation with a fat person, inform them that gluttony is a sin. Here are some Biblical verses you can incorporate into your experience:

Proverbs 23:20-21 warns us, “Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags.” Proverbs 28:7 declares, “He who keeps the law is a discerning son, but a companion of gluttons disgraces his father.” Proverbs 23:2 proclaims, “Put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony.”

Let me know how that works out for you. But you won't do it, because you know it's not acceptable.

What people are having trouble with is the somewhat sudden change, with hostility to homosexuality moving into the category of something not appropriate to spout to a general audience.

And that doesn't mean Phil Robertson shouldn't have said what he said. He was being interviewed and pressed on a topic and he answered honestly. He has a reality show that is entertaining because it's somewhat daring and different, and people can choose whether they'd like to drop in on this particular cast of colorful characters. The culture of the show is a different, smaller circle than the whole American culture. And the network, A&E, is another culture. It includes some entertainment premised on colorful indiscretions that go only as far as fits a corporate brand.

We're in the process of figuring out what you can say where, what has no consequences, what counts as funny or daring and offensive to some but not enough to have a negative effect a speaker or a network, and what everyone ought to know by now is going to hurt you.

What hurts a business like A&E is different from what hurts an individual human being, especially one who believes he is building up his treasures in heaven.

"Sexual sins are numerous and many, I have a few myself. So what is your safest course of action?"

"If you’re a man, find yourself a woman, marry them and keep your sex right there. You can have fun, but one thing is for sure, as long as you are both healthy in the first place, you are not going to catch some debilitating illness, there is safety there. Commonsense says we are not going to procreate the human race unless we have a man and a woman. From the beginning Jesus said, 'It is a man and a woman.' Adam was made and Eve was made for this reason. They left their fathers and mothers and be united to become one flesh, that’s what marriage is all about. But we looked at it and said it was an outdated stereotype. When you look back at the human race, the sins have always been the same: We get high, we get drunk, we get laid, we steal and kill. Has this changed at all from the time God burnt up whole cities because their every thought was evil?"

Phil Robertson preaches, and The Daily Mail is there with exclusive access, trying to understand where he's coming from. And I'm trying to understand how this long game will play out.

Today's Phil Robertson is Justine Sacco.

Every day, apparently, somebody's got to get fired for saying something off, and since I've blogged about the Duck Dynasty flap, I've got to offer up the story of Justine Sacco, a lady no one had ever even heard of, who tweeted, got on a trans-Atlantic flight, and landed to find that during the 12 hours when she was incommunicado the internet had caught fire with outrage over a pointless, stupid remark she'd made, and #HasJustineLandedYet was trending. What a nightmare!

She joked about not getting AIDS, and she discovered she'd come down with a raging case of another disease — sudden-onset fame toxicity. There was no hope for the lady, whose specialty was actually PR, at which she was — to be fair to the company that fired her — manifestly incompetent.

Unlike Phil Robertson, Justine Sacco had no fans. She's just stranded out there, with no friends at all. It's pretty sad. One bad joke — on Twitter — and you're doomed. Will anyone dare make a joke again? Not about AIDS. Maybe not anything with a racial element that might be misunderstood. Maybe nothing that casts the speaker in the character of an absurdly insensitive lout. What else? Be careful! You never know when sudden-onset fame toxicity (SOFT) will strike.

ADDED: "Some liberal white person coming to grips with her privilege and wanting the whole world to know about it" — that's how Professor Jacobson saw the tweet. I said something similar in the comments to this post before reading that. It's actually a pretty easy joke to figure out, if you're at all inclined to read charitably. So the real question is, as Jacobson put it: "Why did so much of the Twittersphere quickly proclaim her a racist and go after her with such a blood lust?"

Jacobson's answer is: "Because it could." I'd say: There really is no "it." The whole 'sphere never does anything. But the virus of hate happens, because somebody saw something and retweeted it in a way that caught on. There was no mind at the top to exercise moral judgment about whether inflating a nonentity for the purpose of destroying her was a good idea or even minimally acceptable. It was a heartless force of nature. I call it SOFT. Human beings need to observe and see it and fight it.... while we still have minds... minds that have yet to go fully soft.