Late last year, Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson gave an incredibly offensive interview to GQ Magazine – go here to read our coverage. The fallout was immediate, and it was a gossip/media/mainstream news story for weeks as A&E tried to figure out what to do while half of America was like “my God, Phil is such a bigot and a homophobe” and the other half of America was like “Free speech means you can’t criticize him ever!” Phil and Duck Dynasty came out on top, sort of. Their fan-base rallied around them, they’re still on TV and they’re still making lots and lots of money. I think A&E probably lost some advertisers but overall… it was zero sum game. So what does Phil have to say about all of this nine months later? Eh.
Throw whatever shade you want at Phil Robertson — he’s not about to duck and cover. As evidenced by his controversial comments about race and homosexuality in GQ last December, the 68-year-old Duck Dynasty patriarch isn’t afraid to speak his mind, even if it alienates fans of his family’s A&E reality show. In fact, he’s about to put himself out there again in a new book, unPHILtered: The Way I See It.
“I don’t worry too much about people hating or insulting me,” Robertson tells Us Weekly’s Asher Fogle in the new issue, on stands Friday. “I’m a sinful man, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes. People have reason to hate me.”
That said, he thinks the GQ controversy was overblown. “All I did was quote a passage of scripture from antiquity,” the father of four says of the interview, in which he lumped homosexuality with sins like bestiality and adultery. “They’re mad at me, but I’m really just quoting what God said, so He’s the one they have a problem with.”
As for his remarks suggesting that black people were “singing and happy” in the pre-Civil-Rights-era South? “I was just giving my experience,” he tells Us of working on a Louisiana cotton farm in the 1960s. “The point I was making was that even when our black brothers didn’t have their civil rights, those people had that one thing the government couldn’t take from them: their faith. They would sing spiritual songs as they were going across those cotton fields.”
A self-proclaimed “poor white boy,” Robertson insists he meant no offense by the comments. “Old Jesse [Jackson] got mad at me and said something about how I was a Jim Crow and a racist,” he recalls of the backlash. “We don’t look at people like black, white, and brown. We’re all members of the human race.”
Pitting people against one another, he says, is why we have gun violence. “It’s never been a weapons problem,” he posits. “It’s a human heart condition of anger and hatred. If people loved God and loved each other, the last thing you would ever contemplate is to murder your neighbor.”
For more from our interview with the Duck Dynasty star — including his thoughts on politics and government, his reaction to being called a “bigot,” and why he hates social media (and has never even “turned on a computer”) — pick up the new issue of Us Weekly.
[From Us Weekly]
Sigh… I have a lot of thoughts about this, most of which are too rant-y to even publish. Phil saying that he was just quoting scripture almost gave me a rage-stroke, for one. But you know what? I honestly feel like this is the kind of “show” that people want to see – it’s like a Southern white-guy “minstrel” show, an extreme and offensive version of how some Southerners feel about race, gender and LGBT issues. It feels like ignorance is being defended because, aw shucks, these are just simple country folk in the South and of course those people think that way, they can’t help it. The support Phil has gotten is patronizing, and the fact that he’s still shilling it just shows that he’s in on it and he’s laughing all the way to the bank.
Photos courtesy of Parade.
Special thanks Cele Bitch
