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Sunday, December 29, 2013

Hey, at least no one seems bothered that Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson thinks girls should get married at 15 or 16



Do I agree with him?  No.

Should he be suspended from his show for saying wacky stuff? Of course not! I'm not a viewer of Duck Dynasty, but I would assume that's why people watch him in the first place.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

So you're taking the position that a private employer can't dismiss a problematic employee?

That's odd because you seem to demand that of the public sector all the time.

Richard K said...

I never said they can't, Skippy - I said I wouldn't under these circumstances. Taking the nature of the show, which I've seen clips of, but not an entire episode (but I think enough to get the gist), the sort of wacky stuff Robertson says plays to their core audience. So it doesn't really make sense to punish him for doing what they basically hired him to do because a lobby group found out and took offense.

Does that mean there are no lines he could cross? I wouldn't say so, but show biz is funny stuff. You offend people and they threaten to boycott you like GLAAD, then you capitulate to GLAAD and run the risk of someone else pulling a bigger boycott. In the end, if you're unfortunate enough to find yourself in one of these situations, you make the call either on principle or as a profit-based business decision and if you're lucky, they may coincide.

Like I said, I think his suggesting teenage girls should get married is pretty nutty, but at the end of it, he's a reality show star who attracts viewers because of his eccentricity, so it would be strange to fire him for being eccentric.

Unknown said...

All things being equal, i could give a shit what some hillbilly thinks about anything, although his views on black folk loving Jim Crow Louisiana were nothing short of hilarious!

I'm way more interested by the massive wave of fake outrage this shitstorm caused. Why, to listen to Team Jesus, you'd think that the First Amendment guaranteed him a prime time show on basic able. Granted, they didn't feel that way about Martin Bashir just two weeks earlier.