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A&E Shocked, Absolutely Shocked, to Learn Some Born-Again Christians Don’t Like Gay People

Ducklings!

Are you one of the many millions of people who watch Duck Dynasty on A&E? I confess, I am not. But I think I get the idea: look at those funny men with their big beards, and their back-country ways! You know, the Here Comes Honey Boo Boo model. But where Honey Boo Boo’s family has nice, safe liberal values about gay people (“Everybody’s a little gay!” exclaims the mop-haired lead character), the Duck Dynasty family . . . does not.

In a recent GQ profile, family patriarch Phil Robertson throws out a grab bag of thoughts about gay people and black people. There’s the usual conflating of bestiality and homosexuality, as well as some thoughts about black people and welfare. Were you to read the profile, liberal, left wing, intellectual A&E viewer that you are, you might be offended. So A&E, not being in the business of espousing racist or homophobic views, they went ahead and put Mr. Robertson on indefinite suspension. Indefinite! That’s serious stuff!

The usual right wing opinionators came to his defense. Did you think Sarah Palin might have an opinion about this? Of course Sarah Palin had an opinion about this:

You can trust Sarah Palin’s opinions about the first amendment because she is an expert on the American government. It’s right there in her Twitter handle: @SarahPalinUSA. Because I’m not an expert on the bill of rights, I don’t include “USA” in my Twitter handle. But despite my lack of expertise, I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. If you are the public face of an organization and you say hateful things, that organization can go ahead and fire you. When you make a reported $200,000 an episode (which, also, pause: consider how you are wasting your life not making $200,000 a week shooting ducks, with additional merchandising and public speaking earnings), the trade-off is that you have to be polite in public. Not a terrible trade-off, right?

Except . . . the Robertsons were apparently pretty explicit about who they were when they signed up. According to son Jase, they told A&E that “the three no-compromises were faith, betrayal of family members, and duck season.” (What would yours be? Mine would be no filming in the morning, I’ll keep betrayal of family members, and not being on TV in the first place). In essence, A&E knew what they were getting into. They knew they were hiring a family of born-again Christians who wanted to talk about their faith (so much so that the Robertsons have complained that A&E is cutting some of it out of the show), and they hired them anyway. Presumably, A&E staffers are with the Robertson family a lot of the time. You know, when cameras are on, and when they’re off. Is there any remote possibility that it is news to anyone at A&E that Phil Robertson believes these things?

Instead, they’re expressing shock that he said those things to a reporter and they’re firing him. Temporarily. If you’re going to be in the business of cultural tourism, you need to be prepared for the consequences. Can they include it in Phil Robertson’s contract that he’s not allowed to talk about anuses to reporters? They can try. But they could have taken the first step of not putting a family they knew to have some troubling views on TV in the first place, just because they seem so folksy and fun, and everyone’s going to have a good giggle about them and oh, by the way, they hate gay people, oops, the camera’s off now!