Phil Robertson

As Americans huddle by their fireplaces and space heaters this week to either celebrate or avoid the Christmas holiday, the nation’s hottest cultural controversy hinges on whether anuses are more desirable than vaginas.

This latest bloody clash in the national Kulturkampf pits dick-hunters versus duck-hunters. It revolves around all manner of contentious cultural axes: red state versus blue state, rural versus urban, gun-toting carnivores versus gun-grabbing vegans, and Christian fundamentalists versus egalitarian true believers.

It was spurred by comments published in GQ last week by Phil Robertson, the scowling, grey-bearded, headband-wearing patriarch of the duck-hunting clan in A&E’s reality show Duck Dynasty, which is touted as the most successful nonfiction program in cable television history:

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.

When asked what he considered sinful, Robertson paraphrased a passage from 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, which is reprinted here from the New International Version:

Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men, nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Clearly the Christian Bible preaches that “men who have sex with men” will not go to heaven. Despite what the Lavender Lobby and the Gay Mafia and the Homo Militia and their rainbow coalition of allies and enablers and apologists would have you believe, homosexuality is explicitly condemned in the Old Testament, New Testament, and the Quran. None of the three major Western monotheistic religions is down with the idea of men going down on other men. So you can either be a faithful adherent to one of these religions, or you can have sex with persons of your own gender”€”pick one and stick to it. But you can’t have both. Hey, I don’t make the rules”€”I only report them.

Don’t try telling that to GLAAD spokesman Wilson Cruz, who said that Phil Robertson, rather than the pro-gay progressive revisionist lobby, was perverting the Gospel:

Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe.

GLAAD”€”which in practice almost always seems far more AANGRY than GLAAD”€”allegedly used its gay superpowers to squeeze the A&E Network into “indefinitely” suspending Robertson from the show within hours after his homo-unfriendly comments went live.

The Robertson clan has reportedly threatened to walk off the show if the ban on their patriarch remains in effect. In an article for the Daily Mail, an unnamed “source close to the family” says that the Robertsons suspect the entire saga was a setup. The source claimed that an A&E representative was present with Robertson during the interview, yet the network made no apparent attempts to quash the comments before they went live:

It is our understanding that when the TV executives came up with the concept for the show they wanted it to be a case of people laughing at a bunch of backward rednecks. But when it didn’t turn out like that and people actually started identifying with the way the family behaved and were laughing with them, not at them, they became uncomfortable. It did not sit will with the New York TV types.

Moral titans such as former crack addict Charlie Sheen and former heroin addict Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe denounced Robertson in the harshest moralistic terms. Lime-sucking enemy of All Things American Piers Morgan opined that “the 1st Amendment shouldn’t protect vile bigots” such as Phil Robertson. The consensus on the outraged celebrity left seemed to be that anal sex between men wasn’t vile; it was vile for people to say it was vile.

Interestingly, the GQ article quoted Robertson making comments about his experiences with Louisiana blacks during the Jim Crow era, but they didn’t cause nearly the outcry that his anti-anus articulations inflamed:

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.

Although the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Morris Dees emerged from his gold-encrusted turtle shell long enough to link Robertson’s comments to Holocaust denial, Phil’s comments reminded me of what a friend from North Carolina once told me about his family. He said his folks had lived for generations as sharecroppers in a shack on a farm alongside black families, and everyone got along swimmingly until meddlesome Yankee activists stuck their beaks south of the Mason-Dixon Line in the 1950s and 1960s to begin sowing dissent.

As a Philly-born expatriate Yankee who’s lived in all four corners of the USA and in Georgia for the past seven years, I’ve seen blacks and whites get along with far greater ease down South than anywhere else in the country”€”far more so than in Philadelphia, which is a de facto apartheid state simmering with self-segregated hostility.