AIDS as God’s “Penalty”: How Phil Robertson’s Comments Reflect Conservative Christianity

By Lauren Young on October 17, 2014

Although we shouldn’t take an elderly white man who duck calls for a living seriously, the terrifyingly vast amount of people who accept his blatant homophobia and misogyny do.

Photo Via huffingtonpost.com

Amongst the other highly-intelligible comments Phil Robertson, the patriarchal figure of the Duck Dynasty clan, has made about various subjects that go way above his head, his latest comment is another byproduct of his unquestioning faith about how AIDS is God’s punishment for those who engage in sexual behavior is among his finest.

In an interview conducted in early September where Robertson was promoting his most recent booklet of whiskey-induced ramblings (otherwise known as his new book “unPHILtered: The Way I See It,”) he stated, “Now to me either it’s the wildest coincidence ever that horrible diseases follow immoral conduct, or it’s God saying, ‘There’s a penalty for that kind of conduct.’ I’m leanin’ toward there’s a penalty toward it.” Sexually-transmitted diseases ( and infections), otherwise known as the moral equivalent of time-outs according to Robertson, have been given a dirty stigma that’s all too common in the ultra-religious community of people who believe God is capable of striking down gonorrhea thunderbolts. To define how this viewpoint is offensive in both the social and scientific aspects of our culture, most fail to dissect the ignorant mindset that demonizes sexual disease and how it’s portrayed as a God-given punishment and instead, label this religiously-endowed, conservative-praised concept as a “personal opinion.”

To understand the concept of sexual diseases, first one must understand basic biology. As one catches a cold, sexual diseases are spread through contact with other human beings. To preach that this is an act of God (while rapists and murderers go miraculously untouched) is an act of both scientific and social ignorance. This infantile way of thinking continues to harm the intellectual progression of humanity because it erases science and replaces it with archaic theological views. Although it is clear this man is a duck-whistling bigot and not a world-renowned biologist, this ignorant mindset is arrogantly supported by uneducated Christians who believe in a childish, Disney-esque way of cause and effect, and morality vs. immorality.

Although this is a direct dig at sexually active bodies and the normalization of sex and sexuality, the time period from which Robertson comes from demonizes sexual nature (with an aggressive violence toward homosexuals and women) and therefore makes his bigotry more than just about the demonization of sex: it’s about misogyny and homophobia. He, along with other traditional Christians who have been socialized to view their hatred and bigotry as products of religious devotion, views genitals as inherently evil and sinful, and the idea of procreation is a beautiful subject if one perceives it as strictly a means to an end. This pseudoscientific viewpoint creates an atmosphere of an unwillingness to accept new ideas and concepts by strictly adhering to the traditional and conservative ones.

This isn’t too hard to imagine when we’ve grown up in our heteronormative culture that pushes heterosexuality, having a direct consequential relationship to the hypersexualization of human beings before they even exit their mother’s wombs (characterized by pink blankets for girls, male onesies with the phrase “ladies man” plastered across the front, etc.). From the moment children are able to open their eyes, all their actions are perceived as having heterosexual tendencies because that is the socially-acceptable default of human sexuality. Why does any of this heteronormative behavior matter? Because it’s rooted in traditional gender roles and conservative behaviorism which dictates how a child should grow up and act in their society, while consequently manipulating them to lead a pure, sinless lifestyle they are expected to share with another heterosexual partner and children. This is the expected social expectation of the Christian human and is perceived as the only way to live a pure life in America.

The homosexual lifestyle, as conservatives like to state it, stabs right into the flesh of this “holier-than-thou” attitude because it disturbs their comfortable reality of clean, quiet sexual intercourse and traditional “family values.” When analyzing Phil Robertson’s arrogant statements and attitude toward AIDS, this ongoing development of sexual diseases are deemed as a problem that is growing progressively worse because the prevalence of gay pride and gender nonconformity. When denying that these “deviant” factors embedded in this cultural analysis of sexual morality don’t influence the Christian perception of sexual promiscuity and STDs, you are furthering the political nature of religious bigotry that still plagues this country’s inability to accept AIDS as a biological virus rather than a divine consequence.

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