Gays, African Americans, A&E, and Those Waiting to be Offended Calm Down!

By now we’re all either tired of hearing about the Duck Dynasty drama or you’re living under a lucky and quiet ROCK.  Just in case you’re peeking out from your rock home I’ll summarize. There’s a reality show about a redneck family. The patriarch of said family said some rednecky things about gays, blacks, and all sinners in an interview. People freaked out and the network, which probably already knew the content of the interview, suspended him indefinitely from the show. Given that they are all done with filming through the next season this will likely go unnoticed since it’ll likely blow over and be resolved before they resume taping.

Since a reality show and its stars are such influential people in how we vote and work to protect and better our communities, of course it’s a huge deal if he has some less than progressive opinions on any such subject matter. It has to be yet another source of divide amongst the people of the internets.  Those who are self-proclaimed die hard Christians claim that redneck dude’s first amendment rights were violated because he was simply expressing his Christian beliefs. Others understand that the first amendment does not protect you from backlash from offended, affected and/or responsible parties when you run your mouth in the wrong situation. And still yet another group thinks this is stupid as hell and doesn’t care who said what and who suspended who.

The reason they don’t care is this issue is …well not really an issue. He is a redneck. Yes he has a show that A & E has made a large effort in its editing to keep us from hearing their political, socio- economic, and other potentially controversial opinions. They are edited to be likeable and the kind of family you want to sit down to eat, pray and drink some of what looks like the most delicious tea ever with! And it works. People from all walks of life love the Robertson family. Obviously not everyone, but there show has a wider non redneck following than one would expect a redneck show to have. Why? Largely because of editing.

What you see on TV is partially the “real” Robertson  family but obviously there is more to the story. There’s parts of their lives we can’t be privy to for the sake of their privacy, the show’s aim and audience, and a number of other reasons. If you have watched the show you have witnessed all the family member’s musings and know that often they ramble on about some crazy shit in a crazy manner not to be taken as wisdom or gospel truth. I wish we could just let this be a tv show star’s crazy ignored comments. No I didn’t mean to type ignorant. I meant ignored as in why do we care so much?!

 In a perfect world the gays and blacks and like minded folks would realize how little this affects them and ignore it.  Christians who feel the need to defend him would not feel the need to rally together to protect a rich, white redneck male (the least discriminated demographic I can think of) because they would recognize that 1. He’s a rambling old man who’s opinion means very little to those involved 2. His life is not horribly impacted because A& E won’t let him be on the show 3. It is a TV show and this is quite potentially a publicity scam to get us to watch and be so grateful Phil is still on there  & 4. While he has the right to believe as he wants and speak how he feels it’s bad when Christians who’s religion is based on love, acceptance, and understanding flock to support hatred, fear, and disgust towards other children of God and use him to do so. We seem to forget that Christianity is about that love and acceptance and not about all the rules that we as people pick and choose which to ignore for ourselves and which to condemn others for.

I leave you with these words as we go into our Christmas and other holiday celebrations. We need to find a way to stop letting every little thing divide us. We have to understand that we are more alike than we are different and focus on those similarities instead of what divides us. Stupid stuff like this should not be used to divide God’s children. Us vs Them never works out. It is a never ending battle of he said/she said. Learn to pick your battles and love one another and give people the benefit of the doubt when they mess up. Life is too short to go around pointing fingers. We’re all doing the best we can to get through this madness.