How Phil Robertson Became So Hated In Hollywood

Phil Robertson is the patriarch of the reality show family featured on A&E's Duck Dynasty. The official bio on the Duck Dynasty site paints the picture of a man who earned both a bachelor's and master's degree in the education fields, but ultimately decided academia was not for him. He headed out into the backwoods, and built a fortune on the most unlikely of businesses: making duck calls.

Robertson says, "No duck would even place in a duck calling contest," and also says his duck calls are for "duck killers" rather than the amateur sort that only use them in calling competitions. Far from being just a respected entrepreneur, Robertson's visibility as a reality show star has helped to make him one of the most controversial and widely-hated figures in Hollywood and across the country. Why? We'll let him speak for himself.

Rather than opt to just simply let it go, Robertson has since continued spewing more and more anti-gay hate speech. In May 2016, he sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about his role in a Cannes Film Festival piece called Torchbearer, and the conversation quickly turned dark. He was quick to defend his previous comments, saying that not only did he not regret even giving his opinion in the first place, but that, "[...] all sex outside a man and a woman in marriage is sin, Biblically speaking."

That came right on the heels of his very vocal condemnation of the idea of transgender bathrooms. CNN reported his comments were emailed in conjunction with his support for an anti-Hillary Clinton film, and he was quoted as saying, "Just because a man may 'feel' like a woman doesn't mean he should be able to share a bathroom with my daughter, or yours. That used to be called common sense. Now it's called bigoted."

The whole thing went even further in July 2016, when Robertson spoke at Denver's Western Conservative Summit. He cited statistics that included 160,000 recent murders, and suggested they were the direct result of a nationwide shift in morality that came after the Supreme Court's 2015 decision regarding the legalization of gay marriage. Robertson has said he doesn't actually hate people who are gay, and that the comments he's made have been misconstrued. According to him, he's just "trying to help those poor souls and turn them to Jesus."

Robertson released his book UnPHILtered in 2014, and while he was promoting it, he spoke on the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins radio show. There, he shared the belief that AIDS and STDs are God's way of punishing people who are gay and otherwise sexually immoral.

"Do you think it's a coincidence that all of these debilitating — literally that can cause death — diseases follow that kind of conduct? God says, 'One woman, one man,' and everyone says, 'Oh, that's old hat, that's old Bible stuff.' But I'm thinking, well let's see now. A clean guy — a disease-free guy and a disease-free woman — they marry and they keep their sex between the two of them. They're not going to get chlamydia, and gonorrhea, and syphilis, and AIDS. It's safe."

He goes on to say that it's only when you get outside of those confines that people are punished, and that it's pretty clear what's going on here.

A lot of the fallout over Robertson's infamous GQ interview came over his anti-gay comments, but there was a huge amount of racism buried in that interview, too.

Robertson, who grew up in Louisiana long before the idea of Civil Rights changed the country, was asked if he witnessed the hate and bigotry we hear about all the time. He responded with some pretty unthinkable comments, saying, "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."

Later, Robertson tried to address the backlash over his comments with a strange attempt at justification that really didn't make a whole lot of sense. He said that he was nothing more than a product of the 1960s, and that he's most concerned with teaching anyone who will listen about Christ and the Bible, while definitely not hurting or disrespecting anyone. It's a baffling comment that leaves more unexplained than understood.

At the same Vero Beach talk, he also took aim at another group he believes are sinners in league with Satan.

Liberals.

Just as he claimed groups like Nazis and communists were so evil because they hadn't accepted Jesus, Robertson went on a tirade about how not only was the liberal contingent of the US responsible for some horrible things, but they were also responsible for the murder of 63 million children. While it's not entirely clear where he's getting his information from, he says, "People call them left-wing loons, Bill O'Reilly calls them, political correct crowd, orthodox liberal opinion. [...] They've killed 63 million of their own children. 63 million. More than Hitler, more than Stalin. [...] You say, 'Who is behind it?' Their father is, he was a murderer, from the beginning, they are slaves to sin, they are controlled by the Evil One. Duh."

He goes on to talk about how it was guns and Bibles that allowed Americans to run "the Brits back to where they came from back there 240 years ago," and how it's the liberals that are trying to take those same guns and Bibles away. That, he says, makes it clear just who they're in league with.

Even as Robertson has continued to spew some of the most hateful thoughts in Hollywood and television, A&E's continued support of the reality star has only served to polarize public opinion even more. A&E's only attempt at sanctioning him for any of his comments ended before he even missed an episode, and that's left people wanting to know just why they continue to support him, his family, and his show. When Salon took a look at the network's wavering stance, they even found they had issued a statement saying he didn't actually mean what he had said. Robertson — and his family — quickly ran to make it clear that yes, they had meant it all.

When A&E suspended him for what amounted to a few days, the entire family issued a statement saying they absolutely stood by him, making it clear that continuing the show was an all-or-nothing deal. They claimed he was "placed on hiatus for expressing his faith, which is his constitutionally protected right."

Salon suggested the continuation of Duck Dynasty was for a very simple reason: money. The same year Robertson's beliefs went public, Bloomberg estimated the show had brought in $480 million between merchandise and advertising. That's a lot to give up, and Salon suggests it came down to a fight between money and morals.

A&E isn't the only one to face that question, and at the same time the fate of the show seemed up in the air, Cracker Barrel was removing Duck Dynasty merchandise from their shelves. Social media was outraged, with NBC News reporting more than 5,000 comments were posted on their Friday Facebook announcement they were pulling Duck Dynasty merchandise. Cracker Barrel caved, and the merchandise was back in stores on that same Sunday.