‘Duck Dynasty’ Patriarch Suspended from Show for Equating Homosexuality with Bestiality

There’s nothing surprising about this; he calls himself a Christian pastor. I’d be surprised if the rest of his family still did the show. And I’ll be surprised if A&E risks losing the show. It makes them a lot of money.

And his remarks about he never saw blacks mistreated before the Civil Rights era, and that blacks were content under Jim Crow is perhaps even more fucked up.

Every time I look at him I hear banjo’s playing and can hear those creepy words from Deliverance: “You got a perty mouth boy.”

The man seems incapable of seeing beyond his own privilege. Only a white straight Christian man can look like he hasn’t bathed in ten years and still get his own tv show.

Didn’t a TV news reporter get fired recently for saying nasty things about Sarah Palin? Did she complain about the lack of free speech then? If she did, I missed it.

Sometimes my cat unexpectedly jumps on the bed, but it never goes that far. At least not in my experience.

Ha, ha, ha … I have to laugh. He had a good thing going, making tons of money, but he just had to ruin it for himself. I just don’t understand what anyone sees in this show. I watched it once and it was boring. It’s like Jersey Shore for Hill Billies.

It is all not only pure BS it is rank stupidity!
Their dimwited buyBull says – Don’t do this!! – so they should not do it!!
Pure and simple! WE and many others are not phuckin sheeple, and don’t have to do what the buyBull says. This is NOT a theocracy, although the xtians are trying hard, and just cuz the xtian taliban does not like something, their buyBull is not the source of our laws.
And his bring canceled is not censorship, not that it matters who watches him anyway??

A&E are a bunch of cowards, afraid of the two-faced pc police. Christians tolerate others only to be censored – Christians ought to wake up and stand against these mafia tactics and not believe this false tolerant mantra because it’s anything but.

Believe it or not, a lot of us aren’t calling out intolerant bullshit because it’s part of a politically correct handbook we’ve all been blindly led to follow. We call them out because it’s the right thing to do. Phil Robertson is being intolerant of a specific group of people through his speech. He isn’t intolerant of anything they’ve done or will do, especially anything done to him personally. He is intolerant of the way they are. Tolerance of his intolerance perpetuates the intolerance of those people.

“Christians tolerate others”?

Like when you set fire to atheist billboards? Like when Christian Militia said the 2nd Amendment authorized them to kill the President? Like when that Russian actor/priest said he would put all gays in ovens? Like when Christians tolerated Jews for 2000 years? Aztecs? Incas? Native Americans? Your slaves? Tasmanians? Hottentots?

You Christians can’t even stand each other. You tolerate nothing. Fuck off.

h/t Kevin of Bangor

Cue complaints of persecution. Cue screams of “censoring my freedom of speech”.

I think the more correct phrase, considering their “shtick”, would be dummer than a bag of hammers..

It must be that slippery slope with a little bit of extra lube.

Now I’m really pleased, because I love hypocrisy; he mentioned drunkards in his interview. The fuckers sell their own wine. Scratch a Christian, you’ll find a major league hypocrite.

Tolerance is a person putting put with someone you don’t agree with. Robertson describes himself in such a way. Forced acceptance is intolerant and crushes liberty, independence, and critical thinking.

It’s just that homophobes are really deeply fucked-up individuals, who like raping children and animals and project their own disgusting fantasies on everyone else.

So Robertson’s speech decrying homosexuals is, how you say it, “putting put with someone you don’t agree with”? I don’t know how you figure that one.

A tolerant person doesn’t take away people’s rights. The religious right wants to prevent homosexuals from having certain rights. That is intolerant. A&E did not take away Phil Robertson’s freedom of speech. Free speech prevents government interference of individuals. Robertson does not get a right to be an asshat and not be fired. A&E has the right to suspend employees if their actions are bad for their business, and it turns out being an asshat is bad for business.

So, the extent of your “tolerance” is that you’ll grudgingly refrain from slaughtering everyone who disagrees with you and bathing in their blood. For the moment. At least until the voices in your head give you permission. But in the meantime you see nothing the least bit wrong with lying about the people you’d rather murder and flinging around thinly-veiled threats.

Take your sick death cult and shove it up your ugly ass.

Grudgingly refrain, oh please. You wish – then at least your pathetic little atheistic arguments would hold water.

Isn’t that imaginary god of yours supposed to have some sort of problem with bearing false witness and pretending to have magical mind-reading powers?

I had no idea GQ was a propaganda mouthpiece for conservative Christianity. I’ll make sure to read other magazines in the checkout line.

A&E has every right to determine who is on their station and who is not.

This isn’t a mafia controlling thoughts, this is a group of people standing up for what they think is right.

Uganda

Do you even go here?

Atheists don’t need much of an argument. All one has to do is listen to some pissant believer try to claim some form of privilege. People like yourself can’t even pretend to be tolerant of others. It only took a lost or two before you started insulting other religions.

Do us a favor, don’t even pretend you give a shit about anyone but your own little group. Don’t use the term tolerance, you have no clue what it means.

“It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus.”

Funny, I hold the same belief. I assume that’s a byproduct of me being straight, and that if I was gay, I’d hold the opposite belief…

Whats depressing though is how many people actually think there is some sort of free speech issue here. It’s like they don’t know that the bill of rights is protection from government. If you want to embarrass your employers by associating them with hate speech, don’t be surprised when they cut ties with you to protect their reputation.

What the hell would you know what tolerance is? you can’t even refrain from insulting other religions.

Just because you have a right to talk like an asshole, it doesn’t make you immune to criticism or social effects of doing so.

You have the right to talk like an asshole. By doing so you accept the possibility some is going to call you an asshole for doing it.

You did not respond to my argument– rather, you define Christian countries as “the most tolerant nations ever” because their victims, being largely exterminated, have no opportunity to be not tolerated. You do not assess their treatment of Native Americans, Incas, Aztecs, blacks, Tasmanians, Timorese etc. as intolerance because American conservative Christians do not consider non-Americans to be really human. So they do not even appear on your radar or get weighed on your balance; you call yourself tolerant because you merely fantasize and pontificate about exterminating gay whites without acting on it. And it helps that some of your subordinated groups have been exterminated, so out of sight, out of mind. “Exterminated” is not the same as “tolerated” and never will be.

Of course, they make their money off of advertising. Many companies are no longer bigoted towards homosexuals, so they wouldn’t want to air their commercials during a show with people that advocate that homosexuality leads to bestiality.

If he had left it at he’s not into the whole anus thing, then cool. Not everybody is (I certainly am not), but he then kept going.

Maybe not for you but the cat probably enjoys it. They are selfish that way

He’s not being censored. His odious views were published in a national magazine. Now he’s suffering the consequence of holding and uttering unpopular and odious views, which is that many people will not like you and private corporations may decide you are a liability to their business. As for “mafia tactics” I’ll just continue having a laugh at that. I don’t know what kind of mafia you have where you’re from, but from what I know they’re rarely so civil as merely refusing to do business with someone they don’t like. Maybe contact us again when A&E fills Robertson’s shoes with cement and he washes ashore on the East River.

Because if he doesn’t attribute their success to christianity, then he’d have to admit that his babbling about christian tolerance is a worthless load of shit.

So, your “evidence” that christians are tolerant consists of you selectively redefining tolerant countries as “christian” when in fact you know perfectly well that you’re lying when you do so. Just as expected. Your sick death cult can’t be defended without lying through your rotten teeth.

Yup. Men are barely more than animals, but we’re also totally better than those women, because Jeebus.

It’s really sad how destructive the patriarchal social construct is to both genders.

She loves the free market until it actually affects someone who shares her views.

Except there’s a difference between having a drink and drinking to excess. You don not score a point here.

Who was burning who? The Romans burned Christians as human torches. Native Americans? They witnessed and established missions to teach and educate them, you should read a book about David Brainerd perhaps.

“Start with Christian behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,”

Fixed it!

Yes, not believing that homosexuality is the same thing as or leads to bestiality, adultery, and prostitution is totally a prejudice. What an astute thing to say.

So if I understand you correctly Hemant, freedom of speech means you get to say whatever you want, but then people have the right to punish you for that speech.
Okay, so if you were fired from your job teaching math based on some anti-Christian statement you made, do I get to say, “Now atheists, don’t start crying about ‘freedom of speech’. You got to say what you wanted, and now you suffer the consequences.”
Or is this only applicable when the offended group is gays?

The Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom would disagree with you. This is a Conservative Think Tank, by the way, if that would help take the piss out of the argument that I’m only tolerant to people who share the same opinion as me.

http://crf.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=survey_files

I have to say, furthermore, that they do indeed rank the USA as better than Norway, for example. But the highest-ranked ones are the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and the USA. So based on this data alone, the USA may be more tolerant.

I have to remind you, though, disagreement with your religious beliefs is NOT intolerance.

What?

He’s probably not allowed to speak to his students about political issues, so his firing would definitely be allowable. I should say your analogy doesn’t quite work, because Hemant’s employer is not a high-profile company where the livelihood of the company depends on how the public views its employess.

Let me make a better one. Say Hemant worked for Fox News as a professional blogger. One day Hemant goes off on a rant about how gays deserve equal rights and treatment. Fox News doesn’t think it represents their viewers well, so they fire him (maybe it would be better with a stern warning, such a suspension in Mr. Robertson’s case here). That’s STILL not a violation of free speech, the company can do what they want. And us here on the blog could still criticize Fox News for being asshats. And the Fox News viewers can all call us asshats too. And we all call each other asshats, and not a single bit of free speech is being taken away.

Better one, Hemant is a blogger for….CNN…..writing about the impact of religion in schools. In an interview with a separate magazine, which has nothing to do with his work for CNN, he says Christians are about as dumb as bricks and as dangerous as Nazis. CNN suspends him, even though nothing he said has anything to do with the job he was hired to do.

I think that is free speech being taken away.

Well that settles it. You don’t understand what freedom of speech means then.

I thought an employer had an obligation to hire or fire an employee based on what they DO only. I thought anything else was wrong?

The internet is abuzz and on fire with the A&E-broke-the-First-Amendment meme. The First Amendment experts are just crawling out from all over the freaking place lol.

No, where does it stop for you is the question. You appear to be saying that A&E should have been forced to continue employing this guy despite his actions taking a negative toll on the revenue of the show. So when does it stop? At what point are they no longer compelled to continue airing a show that tanked in the ratings and is hemorrhaging money because the advertising dollars aren’t coming in any more?

On the internet, everyone is a constitutional expert.

Would you still be getting upvotes if you said you were okay with your employer firing you if they found out you were a member of the HRC or Planned Parenthood?

It seems I don’t understand what exactly people mean by fair and just anymore.

It had everything to do with his job. I already explained it, and you acknowledged it and then tried to argue that maybe it was necessary anyway.

Of course they have a right to protect their investment.

It’s just that…..when a restaurant suspended a gay waiter because of the negative publicity following an altercation that was not his fault at all, I don’t recall people being as sympathetic to their need to protect their profits.

I guess I see that logic.

I would NOT be okay with that. (But I do admire the strength of your convictions).

If I hired at my company, I wouldn’t give half a shit if you went on a Facebook rant about your boss’s “stupid fairy tale bullshit”, or spoke about your support for abortion. I hired you to do a job at a price, that’s all that matters.

To me at least.

I see the logic. I just don’t like it. At all.

Christians need to respond to pro-homosexuality statements in exactly the same way as the homosexual lobby responds to anti-homosexuality statements. Otherwise you get a process whereby the pro-homosexuality statements become ever more extreme, and the shrieking and reaction to anti-homosexuality statements also becomes more extreme, until no-one can even say anything slightly against the homosexual lobby.

Any more, you mean.

Being gay and/or black are not actions. Stating something is an action. Your actions are choices.

It’s exactly the same as MLK, Jr., for example, understanding that when he disturbed the peace with non-violent resistance–saying what needed to be said–and placing his body in harm’s way to do so and make it so that he could not be ignored, that he was still violating the law and needed to accept the consequences through arrest and penalization. Civil disobedience, as the saying goes, is still disobedience.

It’s not bravery if there are no consequences. What people seem to want is the ability to “speak hard truths” and be considered brave in doing so, and yet nothing bad happen to them as a result. That’s a farce and a mockery of actual speaking-truth-to-power. If a person is moved by truth to fight against the prevailing social values or wisdom, he or she shouldn’t expect to make too many friends or win accolades while doing so.

This analysis holds regardless of the content of the supposed hard truths. If gay rights activists believed they wouldn’t face getting kicked around for convincing the society that the way they are treated (pointedly, as second class citizens) was a moral abomination, they would be as deluded as the person who thinks that telling a predominantly gay-friendly society that we really ought to be shoving homosexuals back into the closet they came from if they expected to be making friends and avoiding all consequence by doing so. Telling people that they’re wrong, loudly, usually results in their not wanting to have much to do with you; if it’s an employer, they are likely to fire you. If you are a greater threat to the social order, the power of the law itself will be turned against you.

So where it stops, in the end, is exactly the point at which the person who thinks they are bearing truth to the public and seeking to scream it to any who will listen choose to risk in taking it. We don’t like acknowledging this (mainly because it’s a practical lesson with dicey moral consequences) but we always weigh our duties against one another, and our duty to truth (whatever we conceive that to be) is one among many and not necessarily the most dispositive. If you are the breadwinner of a family, then people depend on you to keep your job for their survival and sustenance; this may weigh against your desire to blast a jeremiad against an abusive employer or one that is acting dishonestly or acting otherwise unethically. It may cause you to hold your tongue if you think it’s wrong when you get an instruction you don’t agree with, or have limitations imposed on your freedom of action in the context of work that chafe either pride or conscience.

That is a simple reality of a world in which possession of power does not correlate with moral rightness or competence or deserving in any significant way. It is also something pointed out by religions themselves, if implicitly, and philosophers, sometimes more explicitly. The folks at the end the story of the Allegory of the Cave beat the philosopher to death for the truth he tried to share, and you well know what happened to the character of Jesus in the gospel story when he tried to share his. It almost makes me want to shout, the nerve of a group of people who follow a guy who got crucified to share what he thought was important that they believe no consequences should transpire for them when they go and follow their deity’s lesson.

Maybe this is a bit blunt, but there it is. It’s a startling bit of cognitive dissonance.

Yes, and if those cause problems at work, the company can fire the person. Most companies have policies against doing those sorts of things in the workplace, and you agree to it when you sign on. In Mr. Robertson’s case, where his job is to be a public persona, he probably signed a similar contract.

Shit. Point, you.

Y’know, I don’t think they should’ve fired him. Ignorant and stupid is sort of their brand — what you expect from the show. That he said something ignorant and stupid in his free time really is just free advertising. Are any gays really hurt or surprised that a couple of backwoods hicks are prejudiced against gays?

A christian fundie doesn’t like fairness, logic and how freedom of speech work. Gee who would have thunk.

I literally have no retort for this whatsoever.

Maybe he thinks that before the civil rights era, being black was the same as engaging in bestiality.

Imagine if the host of a Fox News show compared religion to slavery.

How long would that host continue to work for Fox?

How many of the people crying Amendment, one of the important ones! would be criticizing Fox?

.

No, I just have lots of feelings.

Yes. And I still don’t approve.

I don’t honestly care if you approve or not. That isn’t at issue. What is at issue is how First Amendment rights work and who they apply to: namely, they stop the government disappearing you for saying things they don’t like. Nothing in the constitution protects you from the consequences of your actions.

If I, as an atheist, walked into a church and called everyone inside ignorant fairy-humping c*nts, I would fully deserve to get my ass beat. That’s a consequence. If I had a reality show and went into a magazine article and saidbreathtakingly ignorant things about gays, non-Christians, and African-Americans, I would also fully deserve to lose my show. That, too, is a consequence.

chanceofrainne,

If I, as an atheist, walked into a church and called everyone inside ignorant fairy-humping c*nts, I would fully deserve to get my ass beat.

No.

You should be banned from the building, but not assaulted.

We have the doctrine of fighting words, but we need to be adults.

I hear something I do not like.

Should I throw a tantrum and some punches?

Should I behave in a civilized way and not resort to violence.

Resorting to violence is like resorting to calling an opponent a Nazi – it is an admission of a lack of a valid argument.

.

A few weeks ago I walked past the local LifeWay store (that’s the rebranded Baptist Bookstore so they can sell to other fundies). The entire front of the store was devoted to Duck Dynasty stuff.

In my world walking into a church and calling everyone inside a bunch of ignorant fairy-humping cunts would get you, at most, an incredulous look. Probably an invitation to stay for service.

Maybe in my perfect world people are secure enough not to fear opinions.

But again, that’s my world.

In my company, I wouldn’t care if they were in a homosexual relationship or cross-dressing on the weekends. Precisely because I care about the bottom-line. I want the guy/girl who can do the job at the price I’m willing to pay.

It disturbs me that’s not the end of all relevant considerations.

“Mission” is a euphemism for slave labor camp, jackass. They put the adults to work, and took their children away to be indoctrinated in Spanish culture. But I guess what is “cultural genocide” to some people is “education” to you.

Right, the bottom line.

If you had the Grand Dragon working for you and everyone knew you employed him, there would be a lot of customers and businesses that would not do business with you, and it would directly affect your bottom line.

A guy that is a major figure for the show goes out and says homosexuality leads to bestiality, that is going to drive away business for the show (in advertisers), which will directly affect the bottom line.

Now his 1st Amendment Rights would have been violated if the government arrested him for what he said.

There have been plenty of Islamic countries that were tolerant, and extremely violent Christian ones. Every country has some religious history, so your claim is… what? Christianity isn’t quite as bad as the other religions? Christians don’t kill quite as many people as Muslims? Oh, wow, you don’t kill gays, you just put them in prison. You want a fucking cookie or something?

Mafia tactics? I guess I missed the episode of the Sopranos where someone said something incredibly insulting to Tony, and he responded by calmly walking away and refusing to have anything to do with them. I’ll have to track down that DVD. Anyone know which season it was?

You are such a whiny crybaby. Someone exercises their right to run their business they want, and you call that a “mafia tactic”. I guess you right wingers like being able to fire people, but you don’t like other people being able to fire people.

I’m pretty sure that if he made statements equivalent to what this Duck guy said, he’d be fired.

I believe that gay people deserve to be treated with basic human dignity. Am I intolerant of people who believe differently? Hell yeah I am. You want to focus merely on the fact that you disagree with us, and not talk about WHAT you disagree with us about, when that’s the fundamental issue.

Which is another really good reason to be careful what you say on social media (especially Facebook).

I don’t think that gay people should be killed just for being gay. Do I intend on forcing you to accept that? Hell yeah. Will I put up with you acting contrary to that? Hell no. You want to call me “intolerant”? Fine. I am, according to your dictionary definition, “intolerant”. So what? You think I am the least bit ashamed of my “intolerance”?

He wasn’t suspended for belonging to an organization. He was suspended for something he said, that you have to admit were said in about the harshest terms he could manage. If you worked for an anti-gay or pro-life church and they found out you supported HRC or PP, you bet you life you’d be fired.

I would never rant about my boss on Facebook. That’s juvenile and stupid. Someone that dumb deserves to be fired. It’s one thing to have an opinion and share it with a friend or life partner, but broadcasting it (which is what a Facebook post is) is unprofessional.

It is my understanding that Hemant is employed by a public school. Since his employer is a government agency, its actions implicate the First Amendment. If he were fired by a private employer for anti-Christian statements, that would be discrimination, but it would not be a violation of the First Amendment. And I find anti-atheist discrimination to be much worse than anti-bigot discrimination.

But this is something the person DID.

what a said state that people like this (and not just this guy but so many others) are given a tv show. Really, are we this desperate for entertainment?

And most people pronounce it “beastiality” (and many spell it that way). There is a lot of confusion regarding the word, with people thinking it refers specifically to sex with animals, when it means animal-like behavior.

The problem is, that would be interpreted as actual approval of his comments.

Bah, I JUST told him to take a civics class, scroll down a few comments, and you already beat me to it 🙁

You think it’s free speech being taken away because you don’t understand free speech. I urge you once again to take a civics class and understand what your rights are, and who they protect you against. Being fired for X is *NOT* a violation of free speech or a constitutional amendment. It *MIGHT* fall under discrimination laws, depending on the specific X, but that’s it. In this case, the man went on record delivering hate speech, and the company didn’t like that. To do nothing about it can be taken as approval of his comments. It’s the company looking after it’s own interests. It’s no different than a parent punishing their kid for calling the neighbor a whore in public.

Actions have consequences. Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequence. There is no law saying I’m no allowed to think you’re an asshole for being a bigot. There’s no law saying I have to continue allowing you to be a public face of my company when you run around and start offending people.

I disagree. If you do something that monumentally stupid, you deserve what happens. Somewhere along the line, we seem to be ignoring personal responsibility. Sure, the assaulter would be just as guilty by assaulting him, but when you go that far out of your way to put yourself into harms way, there is no denying you share a measure of fault in what happened to you.

Yes. You represent your company. ESPECIALLY if you are a high profile person. Dragging your companies name through the mud by associating with yourself should get your fired. Would you like to live in a world where you own a subway and you can’t fire an employee for chasing away customers by standing around outside in his subway uniform waving a sign “God hates fags!” just because he was off the clock while doing so?

As a high profile public figure, he doesn’t HAVE to be doing anything specific to the company to be associated with it. For all intents and purposes, he’s a subway employee who’s never out of his subway uniform.

That’s the major problem. Legal has little, if anything, to do with ‘fair and just’. If you want ‘fair and just’, the man should be more than just suspended for attempting to dehumanize an entire class of people.

It’s the same “slippery slope” argument.

If homosexuality leads to bestiality, then a single glass of wine leads to alcoholism.

Hot diggity dog! I think it’s time I write my senator and let them know I’ve been marginalized and my free speech rights violated like a drunken prom date!

thatsthejoke.jpg

Why else would you use an avatar — if you don’t fear ANY consequences from your free speech, use your real name!

Wait Wait you expecting a redneck bearded hunter to love gays? Sounds like a ridiculous idea to me!

There is crud all over Facebook…I support Phil Robertson and his right to express his faith and beliefs, shame on A&E…

Well I guess I do to. Phil can say what he likes when he likes. But so can A&E.

In other words people there got annoyed when you tried to beat them over the head with a bible. When a Christian conservative type talks about tolerance, what they really mean is license. They just want a right to treat others like crap without any repercussions. You can’t even use the term without ironically trashing others in the same breath. You are just a whiny little hypocrite.

A&E is making a business decision. They are going to cater to the side that they’re more afraid of and the side that they deem more intolerant and the side that will push for boycotts. Sorry Robertson.

I had to go to a Christian bookstore with my mom yesterday, and it was also decked out in Duck Dynasty stuff. My local Walmart also has a lot of Duck Dynasty stuff. =/

But what disturbed me the most was an ad I heard on the radio yesterday… Something about how men are supposed to make their house their “kingdom” (or something to that effect), and that women were supposed to not only like it, but also look for men with such views.

I believe it was advertising an event of some sort, because at the end of it, it noted that one of the Duck Dynasty guys would be there to advocate the idea (it may have been Phil Robertson, himself).

I had a sudden urge to vomit.

Someone needs to explain to this guy that anuses are not unique to men.

A&E sounds a lot like Renard in Casablanca

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME

How come old Sarah wasn’t defending Martin Brashir’s right to free speech when he got the axe from MSNBC?

Oh that’s right, he was attacking her.

The Romans burned Christians as human torches? More fake Nero stories. Besides the Nero fake story, we need to remind you that no Christians were actually fed to lions in the Roman Coliseum. Those stories were concocted hundreds of years later. Martyrbation fantasies.

Yeah, people just drink for the taste. That’s why non-alcoholic stuff is so fucking popular.

“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.”

I’m still trying to figure out why greedy swindlers are welcomed, praised and worshiped by churches and christians.

I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Matthew 19:23

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Matthew 6:24

Phil Robertson’s net worth $15,000,000+. Enough said.

I have seen a clip of him saying he wanted to “clean up America”, starting with Hollywood and New York. Vague, true, but I certainly don’t like the implications.

That’s hippie, socialist Jesus, not the real Jesus. The real Jesus had a hedge fund and founded the NRA.

I don’t think they’ll lose many viewers. My guess is most viewers share the same beliefs. A&E is probably just worried about boycotts and the like.

Christians weren’t the only group of people to be persecuted by the Romans. Eventually Rome became two Christian nations called “The Holy Roman Empire” and the “Byzantine Empire” in the east. Christianity became the state relgioin of the Roman Empire during Constantine’s reign.

Christians have a tendency to over exaggerate the level of persecution they experienced under the Romans. The Jews have a much better claim to systemic persecution.

This is very true.

Intolerance of bigotry is not..nevermind.

It’s not intolerance of a company to look after its brand image. Companies attach consequences to bad behaviour all the time. It’s a few steps removed to say that the company is reflecting the will of the public that is “intolerant” i.e. doesn’t like bigots going hating.

Acting in a way harmful to the finances of your employer is always cause for punishment. A&E is not CBN, their audience is made of people who might take offense and withdraw ads or audience share.

While I don’t believe in hell, xtians telling me I’m going to be tortured for eternity really doesn’t go over well.

I have seen news stories on both xtians and gays getting beat up by the ‘moral police’ (private thugs) in various mid-east countries. I’ve yet to see the story of a rainbow gang drive around looking for xtians to beat.

Essentially no. We want to live and let live and not have the rights to marry people as we always should have. We could give less than a crap about what your fundie ass thinks of us as long as your not beating people or throwing your children who turn out to be gay in the streets like we see everyday.

Free speech is not: the right to say whatever hateful shit one wants without social criticism or consequences
Free speech is not: a requirement that someone provide you with a platform against their will
Free speech is: the government cannot throw you in jail for saying words out loud <— even this has limitations. see: threats against the president, incitement, etc.

When was that exactly? It was well into the 60s before gay groups could legally publish a magazine advocating for gay rights. (And that had to go all the way to the Supreme Court. That was a real censorship issue since it was the government deciding what could and could not be published. I think you’re nostalgic for a time that never really existed.

Why is this person not defending Alec Baldwin for being fired from MSNBC for practically the same offence? I guess it’s different when liberals say offensive things.

“I think that is free speech being taken away.”
Free speech doesn’t mean you’re protected from consequences. ‘Free speech’ means the government can’t arrest you for politically unpopular viewpoints – that’s it. I understand that the last several years has seen a big push by xtian outlets to lie about and teach lies about the meaning of the first amendment but it’s really is a pretty recent idea and it’s totally batshit insane.

That’s essentially right, but terminology gets a little muddled around these things.

Let’s unpack this a little. The First Amendment is, unfortunately, a big amendment. We have Establishment Clause (the state shall not establish a religion) and Free Speech (the state shall not inhibit speech), both of which are part of the first amendment.

Balancing the Free Speech of the teacher with the teacher obligations (as a representative of the government) of being religiously neutral in his capacity of a teacher is always where people trip up.

On top of that, one can voluntarily be contractually obligated to restrict their own free speech rights (e.g., “I’ll give you this job and pay you a bunch of money provided you don’t say X and do say Y”). That’s a perfectly valid private restriction on speech, the breech of which would be a contract or employment issue, and not a First Amendment issue.

And keep in mind that such restriction can even be imposed on government employees. CIA agents can’t expect to talk about their work and scream “Free Speech” when they get in trouble for it.

Eh not quite. I expect the xtian community to not cry the entirely inappropriate “free speech” when the redneck bearded hunter guy makes bigoted statements that get him in trouble with his employer.

I have seen several episodes of the show, and there were times where Phil would say things where he was showing his true self (ex: “only girly men cook”). So I just knew it was a matter of time before he’d say something really ignorant.

Not being black, per se; but maybe marrying one.

Phil Robertson was born 1946, lives in the East South Central US Census region, is a white male, and is highly religious. Combined with his stance on homosexuality (which correlates), those factors would seem to suggest on the order of one chance in five he’d be the sort of person still in favor of miscegenation laws — the less subtle of that sort being willing to explicitly equate miscegenation with bestiality.

Call it about one chance in ten, maybe; but it’s thus more likely he’d consider that a bridge too far to burn in public.

Since when did Christians tolerate anything that the law didn’t force them to? You sir are a bigot, but it’s okay just keep your beliefs to yourself and then it would be alright.

Oh, there were plenty of incidents of blacklisting and not-quite-censorship shenanigans that typified discourse in the old days too. Pete Seeger wasn’t imprisoned or censored, but corporations were wary of giving him airtime after he told the HUAC to go piss up a rope. The Smothers Brothers weren’t technically censored either, but it was their anti-war opinions that made CBS pull the plug on their access to the viewing audience.

But when the shoe’s on the other foot, it seems, it’s a whole different fuckin’ shoe!

It’s, I think, slightly more complicated than that because there is a conflation going on that is subtle.

As humans, who among all our other tricks, detect patterns in our prior experiences and make predictions from them through extrapolation, we have come to closely associate rationally expecting a particular result with deserving that result if it was predictable and the result transpired at least in part due to conditions created by a choice.

And it is very difficult to disentangle. Perhaps an easy counterexample for us today to illustrate the disjunction is in the 1950s if a person tried to campaign vocally for racial equality in Alabama, the Klan would burn a cross on their lawn. It’s an entirely predictable effect (every other time someone campaigned vocally for racial equality in Alabama, the Klan burned a cross on their lawn), and the person chose to actively participate in conditions known to bring about that effect. So, they should expect cowardly men in white sheets to start a bonfire on their property. This does not mean they deserve such treatment. Pointedly, the average white guy in Alabama in 1950 might easily and naturally make that cognitive leap from expecting to deserving.

I tend to think, mainly, this is a major defect in the concept of deserving and why it is mostly useless for analysis. Ursula LeGuin, in The Dispossessed, wrote (and I believe wholeheartedly):

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

A person cannot illustrate (and it is disingenuous of others to assert on their behalf) surprise and indignation that a perfectly predictable result transpired as a result in part from a decision that a person has made. But it is an error of the highest order for, in rejecting that surprise to also reject the moral outrage that is decoupled from expectation, in forgetting that the result is unjust regardless of how predictable it was, and that the person is properly a victim who is owed cognizance of that status regardless of what conditional participation in their own victimization they provided.

In our (appropriate) zeal to push back against the easy cognitive error that leads to blaming the victim, I tend to think we go slightly overboard (and claim too much) in rejecting also the pragmatic observation that often victims participate through their choices in being victimized. It is not their fault that they were victimized, but to claim that they should not have expected to be given the totality of predictable circumstances seems silly, too. We can imagine, through normative assertion, a world where that expectation would no longer naturally exist, and try to work towards such a world, but pretending it already does (or acting and speaking as though we already live there) is self-deception.

Tl;dr, The entirely sensible “what did you think was going to happen when you called his mother a whore?!” should be able to rest comfortably alongside a commitment to the moral precept that the speaker being punched in the face in response was still a wrong thing that they did not deserve in an absolute sense, and for which the puncher is morally culpable and responsible. We can imagine a world in which that speech wouldn’t predictably lead to getting punched, but that is not the world in which we live.

So do you get to define Christian beliefs that homosexuality is a sin as bigotry and thus give you the right to be intolerant? Your logic is this- I think homosexuality is moral so anyone who believes different than me is a bigot and therefore I can be intolerant of that belief system.

Just another way of saying think like me or I will punish you and claim the moral high ground by calling your beliefs bigoted.

Not likely for this show. They knew what they were getting. There is no evidence that this has harmed A&E at all. This was their fear of the homosexual activists backlash, not the backlash of the supporters of this show.

These people have a reality show with cameras filming them all the time. Do they even have a private life? Putting that aside, though, the First Amendment guarantees you freedom from government persecution because of your speech. It does not guarantee you freedom from disagreement or economic consequences because of that speech.

Uh, yeah, except in the details. The Christian belief that homosexuality is a sin leads to bigotry (provably, historically; it is what motivated the passage of laws criminalizing and stigmatizing gay people, and gave social cover to those that beat or killed them with impunity), and in apprehending the moral wrong that results, we have the right to be intolerant of that belief, to criticize it in harsh terms when it is articulated, to use the levers of social opprobrium and suasion to combat its pernicious effects so that it does not take root again and perpetuate those identified harms.

The rub, of course, is that you just happened to pick the side that was actually wrong. It’s been a while since Christians in the Western world have found yourselves so completely and so embarrassingly on the losing side of an argument, so it’s not a surprise you have not learned how to lose gracefully; you hilariously equate it to oppression and bigotry against you, even though the conditions that fomented the change were entirely your group’s willful doing. This will probably take a few more devastating losses to sink in, that you are one group among many who will only sometimes be right and will not always get your way. I suppose it’s particularly painful if you are taught that everything you believe associated with morality and religion and social organization comes packaged with a divine guarantee of being correct, so I empathize with the difficulty of coming to terms with finding out that your way is not that special.

I’ll believe all you conservative whiners actually give a shit about “tolerance” of opinions by employers when you also criticizes Wallmart for firing employees who speak out for unions.

So you think what happened here is “wrong”, well then perhaps you should support government enforced workplace rules that would protect employees from loosing their jobs for expressing an opinion outside of work that their employer does not like?????

10-1 says you don’t though… that might protect all that other speech you hate too.

Do you suppose that the men on Duck Dynasty will ever figure out that people are laughing at them — that they’re really Honey Boo-boo with beards?

But that doesn’t answer the question, of when was this time when people as a whole were so committed to the free marketplace of ideas that they disfavored, say, employers firing employees for expressing opinions with which they did not want to associate?

The correct answer is that magical time was never ago. And the only consistency one can find is that the specific people who agreed with the specific opinion at issue would speak up, because they are defending (quite naturally, but quite partisanly) their ally, and it is not the whole society but rather rare individuals who sought to generalize this norm, and they have utterly failed.

Those beards gross me out, but honestly I don’t get the attraction about this show or any other reality show. I have a friend who is addicted to reality TV and I’ve come to the conclusion that I just simply don’t get it.

There are also legs.

True. But some of us aren’t so cowardly we hide from ideas. Some of us WANT a world in which we are exposed to the sometimes unpleasant ideas of others.

People peddle the inaccurate meme that religion causes bigotry all the time, completely ignoring the correlation =/= causation thing at will.

But that’s not something to punish. Even if it’s untrue, there’s a reason people say that, and it’s important to allow them their say.

Some of us take “I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it,” seriously. Not everyone is us it seems.

I want a world where nobody HAS those unpleasant ideas. I realize it’s a dream world, and I would never try to create it through anything but debate and persuasion, but it would be a better world if nobody had to hear this kind of bullshit EVER because it didn’t exist.

I’ve been boycotting Walmart for the last two years precisely because they not only don’t give their workers benefits, but they shit on their free speech rights.

It is precisely because I’m a conservative Christian that I cannot TOLERATE when people use their power as an employer to silence somebody. There are few more cowardly displays of bullying.

I do want to protect ALL speech. ESPECIALLY the speech I hate. I don’t get shit from a bunch of people who agree with me. I learn from those who don’t.

Oh poor thing. I had no idea people more intelligent than you having a discussion of substance rubbed you so wrong.

Well….sorry.

But Jonas, in your subway example aren’t there real rules about “harassing your employees or customers”. Shouting “fags fuck ducks” or something equally idiotic on the platform is specifically creating a hostile environment for paying customers.

If he was yelling this, OFF the clock at his local FoF chapter…..well, I don’t know if I’d do anything to him.

On another note, your point about a public figure never being off the clock makes a little more sense.

From the gossip site ‘the superficial’ the writer makes a good point:

“”If you’ve logged onto Facebook at some point in the past 12 hours, you’ve probably seen a family member or high school classmate going apeshit that Obama cancelled freedom of speech and personally fired Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty for his anti-gay comments to GQ. Except what really happened is that A&E “suspended” Phil from the show – for a while – which will still be filmed by the rest of the family who apparently don’t have a problem going along with any of this which should’ve been the first red flag to all the Duck Dynasty fans currently being played like a harp from hell. And the next one should’ve been the immediate media firestorm from making Phil a martyr which naturally happened. His popularity among his fanbase couldn’t be higher if she shot a black kid which is one of the benefits of having a target demographic of oblivious zealots who have no fucking clue how freedom of speech works or when their puppet strings are being brilliantly pulled.“”

http://www.thesuperficial.com/phil-robertson-suspended-duck-dynasty-a-e-freedom-of-speech-12-2013#more-2574462

I truly hadn’t thought of it that way.

True. But some of us aren’t so cowardly we hide from ideas. Some of us WANT a world in which we are exposed to the sometimes unpleasant ideas of others.

Yes. But far fewer people want their place of business directly associated with an idea they do not stand for or believe in. I love the free interchange of ideas, but if I owned a business and an employee spouted off to the press how he or she thinks, say, Black people are equivalent to monkeys, I would not hesitate for an instant to fire them. It is their right to express their loathsome belief, but not their right to be associated with me while doing so. I am sure, in this day of blogs and message boards, they can find or create some forum to spout off their ideas to their heart’s content for all the world to see; they are not censored. And if I chose to not act, by my not acting (and this part is whether we like it or not) I would send the signal that I condone the expression of that opinion, that I find it legitimate enough that it should swim in the pond with much worthier notions. People draw irrational conclusions all the time, but to the extent that those associations are predictable, we should act as though they will be drawn.

When it comes to personal friendships and relationships, this rule does not apply as strongly, as I expressed the other day. I can value a person despite their holding some notions I consider fractally wrong. I can maintain relationships that are fruitful with people whose beliefs I abhor, but crucial to that is that their bad qualities are outweighed by other qualities I value. I do not like them because they are wrong, but despite them being wrong. A quality I do value is their willingness to discuss their ideas, that I may improve my own arguments by testing them against theirs (and undoubtedly, his or her likewise improvement in tangling with mine). That should not be mistaken with valuing the content of the difference of opinion itself.

And even there, if it comes to that person acting on those beliefs in a way I find harmful in an inexcusable way, I may disassociate myself from them. I have a friend who in the privacy of hanging out with white people occasionally expresses virulently racist opinions. I do not value his racism at all, and if I were to ever observe or hear of him actually acting on that belief by treating a person of a different race disrespectfully, that would be that. There are prudential limits to tolerance, just as there are prudential limits to the application of all pure concepts; we don’t float in a clean crisp space of Platonic Forms, we live in a messy real world where ideas and ideals are corrupted necessarily by the very act of application. When people ignore this and try to apply the pure idea, it always leads to horrible results. Always.

Some of us take “I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it,” seriously.

Someone snarked at you earlier (and not undeservedly, I dare to say) that you need remedial civics education. This comment above and its ken are why. When Voltaire said that, it is absolutely clear he was talking about government action–the heavy and violent hand of the State–weighed against a natural right to hold and express opinions (however wrong or abhorrent). Voltaire was very much not saying that by expressing such opinions you also have a right to maintain your friendships and your employment and all the other voluntary associations that you possess when you go off on a tear and say something offensive. People have the right to walk away from you, or show you the door if you are in their “house” (which includes their business if it is a private business). The state is treated differently because the state has the right to use violence, and so the firewall of freedom is against the state’s ability to use that violence (to put you in chains or drop you in a hole or kill you) to prevent disfavored opinions from ever seeing the light of day. In contrast, nobody is physically prevented, or should be prevented, from torching their friendships or their employment by sounding off.

tl;dr, nobody should be prevented from saying jerky things, but nobody wants to, and nobody ought to be forced to, stand next to a jerk.

As I responded, I’m fully aware my knowledge is incomplete on some things, and contrary to a few trolls, I seek to fill in those gaps of my knowledge.

Where my issue comes in is that….on this very website, I could chewed out for not being sensitive to the fact that many atheists can be ostracized at work for expressing their atheism. There are states where you can be fired for being openly gay. Somebody, I forget who, made this retarded list of companies to boycott because they supported Planned Parenthood.

In my view, the way it SHOULD work, is that where business is concerned, it’s all about the business. If someone’s personal opinion doesn’t impact their ability to do their job, then I don’t think I care about their personal opinions.

That is only one passage of the Bible. You need to understand the whole bible to understand .

Yes, I do see the difference. Though the snark was a little unnecessary.

I feel the same about the beards. Those dudes are creepy as fuck.

I’m Christian, I’m interested in “live and let live”. If my gay employee performed and delivered for our customers, I’d promote him.

Har har.

IGNORE

IGNORE

Next they will be taking credit for Saturnalia.

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So where did Phil Robertson call for any of that in this interview? He didn’t. He is being called to punishment for his religious beliefs and nothing more.

There’s that tolerance of different views rearing its head again

The Bible is surprisingly consistent in denouncing greedy swindlers. You can find the same message, with different emphases, repeated numerous times in the Mosaic law, the book of Proverbs, many prophets, the Gospels, and the Pauline epistles, as far as I remember. The only exception I can recall off the top of my head are Jacob a.k.a. Israel, who first swindles his own brother Esau, then his uncle Laban (who did swindle him first, though), and is nevertheless considered the good guy.

Oh, silly me – Jacob’s story clearly shows how to interpret all the apparently harsh words about greedy swindlers: by pretending they aren’t there.

Yeah, you have a point. Controversy always generates higher ratings–this could very well be a strategic move on the part of A & E.

If people are being mistreated because of superstition or stereotype, then that is wrong.

It does not matter whether the superstition is Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Wiccan, or just the stereotype of everybody knows that ______.

Each can lead to immoral mistreatment.

Martyr Complex: check
Ignorance of World History and Religion: check
Invokes a “Silent Majority” that wants the same thing: check
Argument ad Populatum: check

We have a winner!!!

Ahh yes, see this is where you show your true colors. You want special protections for YOUR religious views ONLY. What is a Wallmart worker says that they believe the teachings of jesus christ demand that workers form a union? Do you think that is the same then? I bet not, because YOU think YOU and JUST YOUR beliefs are special (and those that hold YOUR beliefs), and should be treated as such while extending no such curtsy/legal protections to anyone else.

Him stating his beliefs is hate now? WOW. Grow up. He was asked a question and answered it. Just because someone doesn’t agree with a lifestyle does not mean they are spewing hate. Most of these comments on this thread are spewing hate. Take a look in the mirror.

And on a side note- after Chick-fil-A is now doing better than ever due to people going out of their way to give them business to show their support.

We are animals.

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Fails to address the issues – check

I can hardly stand to look at him without wanting to drag him to a barber…

I doubt they care. They’re super rich and getting richer by the minute. They’re laughing right back.

I never called for his firing. But if msnbc can fire Martin Bashir and Alec Baldwin for saying inappropriate things (one on air, one off) then A&E can fire Duck Douche for saying inappropriate things about gay people and African Americans.

As for who does it hurt. Well as a gay man who grew up in a fundamentalist home I can tell you exactly what that hurts: the kids who is gay whose parents, friends, classmates and everyone else he knows is cheering on these comments. That’s who gets hurt.

Intelligent Donkey,

Don’t worry, I won’t mention your relationship with Shrek and how that started in a gay bar.

Also why should wether a person who expresses a moral view outside of work receives protections under the law from being fired depend on the arbitrary classification of wether or not the moral view is “religious” or not?

Other than establishing a special protected class for religious people who would thus have more rights than the non-religous, doesn’t that mean the state has to legally define what religious beliefs are then sanctioned for protection thus establishing a state religion?

realeasygoing,

Wait Wait you expecting a redneck bearded hunter to love gays?

Expecting a Christian pastor to love his neighbor?

Sounds like a ridiculous idea to me!

Or just a ridiculous comment.

There is a big difference between loving and loathing and a lot of room in between.

It isn’t one ot the other.

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Not everyone is intelligent enough to grasp that the sex lives of others are none of your business, and we accept that.

But we don’t find it harmless for people to state that our sex lives are as “icky” as bestiality, or pedophilia, etc. If you have a hard time grasping this, then I recommend you be “gay” for a week (in a town you aren’t familiar with), and listen closely to what people say while they beat you up (or worse). If your ears still work, you’ll hear your tormentors echoing Robertson more often than not.

Oh, and on a side, note, I find nothing wrong with bigots eating greasy crap every day to support each other. Feel free to keep on that diet as long as you want, and make sure your supporters do too.

Yes, calling anything that really has nothing to do with you but is integral to someone else is harmful. My real world harms are infinitely more important and valuable and a better basis for morality than your pissing off of your invisible imaginary friend (sin).

The semi-objective out is that I can judge beliefs and value beliefs by the amount of harm they cause. If two women (like my aunt who has married her partner of 20 years) want to get married and have the legal protections like any other 20 year couple, how does that actually harm you? How does +1 marriage (or even +1% of all marriages) negatively impact your or the State? It doesn’t. How does denying them marriage hurt them? A lot, in literally thousands of ways big and small.

Yes, I feel more than justified in saying that my basis for morality is superior to your and I’ve given you the ultra easy and effective way (that doesn’t require consulting a religious scholar) to figure out right from wrong for yourself. This is the polar opposite of me just willy nilly choosing to support my ‘tribe’ or not.

Worse, RW, I’ve ranted this simple rant for you more than once. Are you willfully obtuse, a persistent troll or simply unable to learn or take into account the views of others when you’re engaging in your endless tribalistic support for your personal supernaturalistic morality?

My view is that I get to torture small animals to death in front of your house. It’s on public property. Do you tolerate my views or do you speak out against it (regardless of legality, you could do this in some States)? What if I have bible verse that I point to in support of my actions?

Not all views are entitled to equal dignity. Your anti-LGBT stance is among those harmful views that I push against.

Fired for being an atheist? Of course not. But this guy isn’t in trouble just for being Christian. If the atheist in question, say, compared all religious people to terrorists or kept making other insulting and demonstrably untrue remarks about them, then maybe you’d have a case.

I agree, you completely failed to address the issues.

The family worked for their money, don’t live an extravagant lifestyle, and are known to donate to charities and all sorts of causes. If it weren’t for rich people donating to charity then there’d be nothing to give the poor.

It doesn’t matter how much money you have, it matters what you do with it.

Ya I would like to blast some of them for their comments as well. The religious right is in full swing. I guess they are going to boycott A&E now…ya right!

Even better, you can invoke the silent majority to support whatever you want. They’re happy to stay silent and support whatever you need. Lets hear it for the silent majority!

he is being called out for his profoundly ignorant remarks that are cloaked in religious nonsense. he doesn’t get a pass cuz he says your invisible genie’s fairy tale book may think that.

Yes, the bible is very consistent in denouncing greedy swindlers.
Unfortunately, Christians lavish greedy swindlers with praise and look the other way as long as the swindlers keep saying pretty jesus words.

I don’t care if these hillbillies believe in imaginary friends. I draw the line when they try to take rights away from real people because the voices in their head said to do it.

I’m sorry that you think we should all live in a world where everything is handed to us. Not all Walmart employees are on public assistance (I wonder how many wouldn’t *have* to be if they made better choices; surely not all of them are on it by choice). I’m also sorry that you’re under the impression that the Walton family does nothing for others.

http://www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org/

That was not a First Amendment issue, either.

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So you know the charitable practices of the Robertsons, right?

You’re also making a connection between food stamps and charity which seems logical, but how many people are on food stamps that shouldn’t be? A lot of charitable giving isn’t even claimed on tax forms – some people just help other people out: buy them dinner, give them $20 for gas, etc. You’re also talking about the exchange of money – what about those things that aren’t related to money? It’s true that a lot of “rich people” give to charity based on what they can get as a break on their taxes … but so what? Aren’t they still giving?

While many religious charities may have an 80% overhead (I don’t know and don’t care to google it right now), I’m sure there are plenty of non-religious charities that operate just like that.

It’s not wrong to be rich.

And dicks, don’t forget the dicks.

Pardon, whose stopping you from standing on the street with a sign that says “God hates fags!”? What keeps you from going to that college campus where the crazy lady keeps telling everyone they’re going to hell, and listening to her?

>Some of us take “I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it,” seriously.

That’s just it. You have the *RIGHT* to say it. No one has the *OBLIGATION* to provide you the platform. I don’t defend your right to DEMAND someone give you a microphone so you can spread your ideas. I don’t defend the DEMAND that you be protected from the social consequences.

Anyways, religion would get less flak about causing bigotry if it’s books weren’t so full of bigotry and attempts at dehumanizing those who don’t follow the religion.

The difference is, you are confusing your *RIGHTS* with discrimination laws. Your constitutional rights are about what the government can’t do to you. The law tells people what they can and can not do.

Now I pose the question: How much intolerance do I have to tolerate before no longer tolerating intolerance is good sense, instead of also being intolerance? Is rallying against bigotry and hate really to be compared to rallying against gays/blacks/atheists/discriminated minority of choice? Where exactly is the line that one must cross before me pointing out they’re hateful little shits is *NOT* considered being intolerant of them?

Of course I’d heard of minstrel shows. I knew what they were in concept but I’d never actually listened to recordings of the music or looked at any of the sheet music of the songs. Or seen video of performances. No, I hadn’t. I suspect most people my age or young also hadn’t. (Although some of the music without words or with different words survived into the present.) So no, I had no idea just how bad this material was. And more startling was to see it bound together with Bellini arias and more genteel parlor songs. I’m too young for Amos and Andy and such things and it’s not like CBS likes to admit that they ever aired that, so it doesn’t exactly show up in any retrospectives. I think because we (out of respect for African American people) have buried so much of that material that people now can convince themselves that things weren’t really as bad as they actually were. Or Mr Douche Duck can convince himself that black people were just fine with Jim Crow laws because none of them were dumb enough to complain about them in front of a racist white person like him. The lynchings and other horrors are well documented (and according to older relatives a lot of it wasn’t prosecuted or reported on in the papers because the local authorities were the ones doing the lynchings.) My point is that it’s one thing to know about such things and it’s quite another to be confronted with the horror of what it really was. KNOWING is something else entirely. It makes me sick at my stomach to think about it and that’s just the covers of the sheet music and the words to the songs, not the violence and terror inflicted on African American people for over 100 years.

I do tend to go on a bit. 🙂

This point is a point I take the time to belabor (carefully, and with as much precision as possible) because to me it is a particularly worrying and distressingly common sloppiness that creeps into highly-charged conversations like those about rape prevention that, once there, cannot be uprooted because it becomes married to the extremity of the wider issue. A person making the point that you did and I did runs a risk of being called a rape apologist or worse simply because (rightfully) emotions run high due to the issue being difficult and deadly serious one and people are, due to that extremity, less tolerant of nuance and fine distinctions.

rwlawoffice,

So do you get to define Christian beliefs that homosexuality is a sin as bigotry and thus give you the right to be intolerant?

When your superstitions and stereotypes lead to laws that harm others, your superstitions and stereotypes deserve no tolerance.

.

Hey its your bible. You can either follow it or make up excuses why you don’t. You would rather make excuses than live by the morals of the religion you profess to be part of.

If not for rich people many would not be poor in the first place.

There is no moral benefit to being rich. Jesus had nothing nice to say to the wealthy. His followers liked nice things and greed too much to follow his lead.

I have not had the misfortune of seeing either show, but I like the concept of mashable lowest common denominator media.

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Akman,

That is only one passage of the Bible. You need to understand the whole bible to understand .

Ignore the contradictions of the content, but believe that the contradictory whole makes more sense than the contradictory parts.

We are supposed to believe there is some context that ignores the bad parts and only values the good parts.

The good parts and bad parts are different for each person reading the Bible, so the Bible is the Book of Ultimate Relativism.

Rape, slavery, murder, genocide are all good to one person reading the Bible.

Rape, slavery, murder, genocide are all bad to one person reading the Bible.

The difference is the prejudice of the reader, not the whole of the Bible.

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True, but I still don’t comprehend what people see in it.

Not according to the bible.

There was no Godless Constitution until the US.

Should that have discouraged the Founding Fathers from going against tradition?

As we become less superstitious, we eliminate more discriminatory authoritarian laws.

PS – I do not know if all cultures have viewed homosexuality as immoral is true, but I doubt it.

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No, because a “sincerely held religious belief” (puke) outweighs everything else.

“You need to understand the whole Rigveda to understand”
“You need to understand the whole Dhammapada to understand”
“You need to understand the whole Arul Nool to understand”
“You need to understand the whole Talmud to understand”
“You need to understand the whole Apocrypha to understand”
“You need to understand the whole I Ching to understand”
“You need to understand the whole Qur’an to understand”.

See how that works? It’s self deception to claim your religion overrides all these others. Please try to be a better scholar, if not a more honest one.

Actually Alec Baldwin is very much a part of this discussion. He was fired for the exact same thing. What both Mr. Robinson and Mr Baldwin said were personal attacks. Equating gay people to beastiality is a personal attack on a entire group of people.

Don’t discuss issues at work you are not willing to lose your job over. As has been explained to you over and over in this thread, freedom of speech only protects you from government retribution. It doesn’t protect a person from the consequences of bigoted speech in the private sector.

I agree with everything you said, but I want to point out that he absolutely DID say racist shit in that interview,

Neither do I.

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As long as he does not worship money over god then I don’t see the problem you’re trying to make up. If he’s using the money to do good things who cares what his personal belief is.

The fact that we disagree on these issues does not make me obtuse. It makes me a person who disagrees with you because I think you are mistaken.

This is not a discussion about same sex marriage, but I believe that it does harm society and this harm is based upon the changing reason for marriage and the change of focus from a societal protection of children to one based entirely upon the desires of adults. That is not Biblically based and is for another thread of discussion.

Your basis for morality is relative to what you perceive to be harmful. That is inherently different for each person and is no basis for the morality of a society. Sometimes laws are in place for the common good, not just to the desires of the individual. or a person’s individual definition of “real world harms”.

“crying fowl” — pun or awesome typo? 🙂

A&E knew all along that he was a raging homophobe.

Sure, but as long as he didn’t make it into a big public thing, they were fine letting him have his opinion. Now, he did, and they responded in kind.

Because that’s what you get for having the sheer audacity to be born poor.

Like civil rights, interracial marriage, woman’s suffrage,….

Of course there were Christians on both sides claiming to hold God’s moral teaching. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the liberal position, for civil rights, for interracial marriage, for woman’s suffrage, is, let’s say, right. And the opposing Christian moral teaching is, how shall we say it,… wrong.

Christians know full well and have for thousands of years that the world reality is different from their beliefs. You read about it in the Bible and from the founder on out its leaders were killed for their beliefs.

Just two minor corrections.

Whether Robertson said it is irrelevant. You’re the one who needs to stay on point. You said “Forced acceptance is intolerant and crushes liberty, independence, and critical thinking.” If that were actually true, then forced acceptance of the idea that gays shouldn’t be killed crushes liberty, independence, and critical thinking. So either what you said was wrong, or you think forced acceptance of the idea that gays shouldn’t be killed crushes liberty, etc. Which one is it?

The point is that, by your dictionary definition of “intolerance”, passing laws against killing gays is “intolerant”. The point is that simply screaming “intolerance” without any concern about what is not being tolerated is invalid, which you implicitly agree with by trying to invalidate my post by claiming that you don’t want to kill gays. If you really thought that the issue was “intolerance”, the consistent thing to do would be to continue to condemn my “intolerance”, without any concern for what I am not tolerating. But you don’t really think that all intolerance is bad, you just think that intolerance of your position is bad, which is exactly the attitude that you are condemning in us. I have no problem with some attributes being tolerated, and others not, and I see nothing hypocritical about that. Now that you’ve implicitly agreed that some positions don’t deserve to be tolerated, the only remaining issue is whether your position is such a position.

Sure, that’s easy. He states that black people were happier working for the white man as virtual slave labor, they were always “singing” so that proves that their lot was better. Apparently welfare is to blame for them becoming unhappy with their lot of being kept poor.

It never occurs to him that in the Jim Crowe era it might have been unwise for a black man to bad mouth the white ruling class in the presence of a white man, even “white trash” which was still going to be a higher class in that era.

“Your logic is this- I think homosexuality is moral so anyone who believes different than me is a bigot”

You are such a liar. It’s not “Anyone who believes different [sic] than me is a bigot”. It’s “Anyone who disagrees with my belief that gays should be treated with equality is a bigot”.

Expressing animus towards someone for no good reason is bigotry. that’s what “bigotry” means. It is not a “redefinition”. So, yes, if someone disagrees with you that you have a good reason for expressing animus towards gays, then they are going to consider you to be a bigot.

Do you think ANY bigot should be allowed to employ this defense? Should any bigot be allowed to say “I believe that I have a good reason for hating this group, so you’re calling me a bigot because I don’t share your belief system”? Can you name anyone for whom the label “bigot” is perfectly valid?

I thought the Christians were liberal.

In the Bible, Jesus exemplifies many parts of the hippie lifestyle.

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marshmallow,

Yep the Kardashian show, for example, is entirely scripted.

I did not write entirely scripted.

I wrote –

“The correct term is less scripted TV.”

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Ok, I have to ask just a few questions that no one seems to be able to answer.

1) how the hell did these people become so popular? I thought the Jeff Foxxworthy Redneck things was over and we realized what morons these kinds of people were.

2) Why did they ask what the guy thought of gay marriage. Seriously we know he’s a redneck, we know he’s a christian, we’ve heard the guy try to speak english…put it together.

and 3) Can we just cancel the show and put a new star trek in its place? We just might raise the intelligence of people

1) I really don’t know, but I think people have a thing for dumb people. Especially on “reality” TV
2) No idea, they already knew the answer
3) That would be amazing. I did read something about a new one possibly happening with Captain Worf, which might be an interesting twist. If I read the article correctly, he’d be flying a Defiant class star ship (from DS-9)

“Gay” actions do not harm the common good.

“Harm”, in it’s common usage, is ridiculously easy to figure out. Is someone going “OW!” (physically or emotionally)? If yes then it’s harmful. The next question (element mr attny) is justification. Some harms can be justified but if you’re making someone go ‘ow’ you need a good reason. I disagree with you that your promises to a supernatural being are a valid justification for you making gay folks go ‘OW’ (injury to 3rd party is not justified by bilateral contract…go figure).

Ahhh there in is the issue- justification. What someone says is justified someone else will say it is not, thus relative morality.

Would be happy to have a discussion with you. Frankly i didn’t understand your comment.

By the way, if you read his comments without your biased glasses you will see that he did not say that homosexual behavior leads to bestiality.

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

I think it just takes glasses.

rwlawoffice,

The Bill of Rights is designed to protect minority groups from the tyranny of the majority.

Big Brother deciding which consenting adults may marry which other consenting adults is an example of the tyranny of the majority that is coming to an end.

People are realizing that the moral authority of religion is a fraud.

Using fraud as a basis for moral authority is harmful..

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That would be like Christians saying- I don’t steal but I know other people do;

No.

Stealing hurts others.

Homosexuality is consenting activity between adults, just as heterosexuality is.

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But what they want is moral acceptance to behavior that our faith teaches is a sin.

All that matters is legal acceptance of behavior that only some religious people oppose.

Nobody needs moral approval by an immoral organization.

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And Orthodox Jews believe that a cheeseburger is an abomination unto God. Your religion is your religion and applies only to you. You think sex outside of marriage is sinful? Wonderful: many people disagree.

As it is not against the law to have sex outside of marriage (indeed, the Constitution grants people the right to have sex outside of marriage), non-Christians can have sex outside of marriage if they want. Non-Christians can be gay, they can refuse to go to church, and they can take the Lord’s name in vain.

You follow your religion’s rules and they’ll follow their religion’s rules.

[Cue “Sex with Ducks” by Garfunkel & Oates here]

O.K. a day latter I am now convinced everyone here had it wrong, even me. I thought he was probably “suspend” because I’m sure there is gay people working pretty high up in the network, and he he basically said sex with their partners is akin to fucking a dog. A pretty good way to piss off your boss. But now that more of the interview has come out, I need to hand it to A&E, they did an brilliant job of spinning this in their favor and we all fell right into it.

I think A&E saw that the really offensive thing he said was the comments he made about black people and civil rights, that was the potential show killer. Yes, the comments about gays are bad, but pretty much even many anti-gay right wing christians could potentially look at his comments on black people and say fuck you to this show. But by leaking the anti-gay comments first they buried his race comments under all the internet noise, and most importantly turned him into a right wing christian hero/martyr before anyone could hear about the race stuff. So now by using the gay comments A&E has galvanized support for the show from the anti-gay segment of the country, who now will overlook (or never hear) his race comments.

So now rather than the national discourse being “holly crap this guy thinks black people where happier under segregation and now all live on welfare” which would have very little support, they turned the dialogue into one of being anti-gay, which sadly does have a lot of support.

Well played A&E… well played!

“Homosexuality does not get special treatment.”

I’ll believe that When you start calling for straight people who have premarital sex to be disallowed from getting married by the state.

That may have come up briefly in a history class but we spent over a week on this material. You really can’t understand the development of American popular music or theater without a knowledge of this tradition. (Otherwise you’d think that certain theatrical or musical traditions suddenly sprang from nowhere in the 1920s.) There is some very good academic research and a lot of the music is up on the Library of Congress website (with pdfs of much of their sheet music collection). I think it was the extended scenes of it and seeing how mainstream it was that was a shock. And also just how horrible it was. It’s one thing to know something vaguely and quite another to watch an extended sequence in which it’s presented so unapologetically, especially when it features mainstream celebrities or parts of movies that have long been edited out. I’m older than you and I remember rather racist cartoons shown on tv when I was very young. But that was long ago and it’s not something I choose to think about. So horrible and not really that long ago.

A side story. When I was living in Germany about 10 years ago there were two productions of Krenek’s opera Jonny spielt auf. Jonny is an African American jazz musician and the role in the Vienna production was played by Danish baritone Bo Skovus. I was horrified at the picture of a white man in dark makeup (though nothing resembling blackface) and a giant afro. (They appeared to have moved the whole thing to the disco era.) I was horrified. My friends couldn’t understand the problem since there is no history of that specific performance tradition there. (Although there are similar kinds of racist entertainment in their own past.) For one thing it wouldn’t be that hard to find an African American baritone to take the part. (There are plenty of them. I’d be happy to make some recommendations. I probably have at least a half dozen acceptable options just among my facebook friends.) “Aren’t people past that yet?” was my German friend’s response. No, not as long as people who attended segregated schools (which in my hometown is anyone even a year older than me) are still around.

Funny how you don’t see Sarah Palin defending…

okay I’ll stop now..

I take it you mean “then”, not “then”. Even with that change, that sentence is incoherent. What have I said that is in conflict with Phil Robertson being called a bigot, and how?

To be a bigot is to have animus without good reason. I don’t have animus towards gay people. So if you differ from me with respect to me not having animus towards gay people, then you are a bigot. That’s just another way of saying that if you fulfill the conditions of being a bigot, then you a re bigot. What is odd about that? That is a self-evident statement. Why do you keep harping on the fact that we are saying that if you fulfill the conditions of being a bigot, then you are a bigot? What is your point?

You seem to be trying to engage in an equivocation game: you point out that if you disagree on one particular issue, you are a bigot, and you then word it as if disagreeing with us on any issue leads you to being called a bigot, which is plain dishonest.

You are a liar and a bigot.

And I notice that you refused to answer my question of whether there is such a thing as actual bigotry. Why do you refuse to answer that?

“Sure there is actual bigotry.”

Name something that you believe is bigotry.

“My point is that this word is thrown around when there is a difference of opinion on an issue.”

My point is there are some matters on which a difference is bigotry. For instance, on the question of whether gays should be killed, differing from my opinion is bigotry. I have made this point AGAIN and AGAIN, and the fact that you simply keep making the same fallacious point shows that you’re not only a bigot but a dishonest one as well.

“You claiming that bigotry exists when there is no good reason to hold that view is an improper definition and lessens what true bigotry is.”

I never said that any view without a good reason is bigotry, you lying piece of shit. I said animus without a good reason is bigotry.

And I note you refused to answer the question “What have I said that is in conflict with Phil Robertson being called a bigot, and how?”, which joins “Can you name anyone for whom the label “bigot” is perfectly valid?” in the list of questions that you are evading.

I didn’t know that. At all.