So picture this: a giant white tent, gorgeous in the sunrise, filled with hundreds of people, old people, families with children, all gathered. Flowers decorate every well-appointed table. Local orange juice, coffee, and pastries await the prayer-desiring patrons. Waitpeople in white shirts and black ties take care of everyone. There are opening prayers, songs, and... oh, wait, we don't have to imagine it. Here's what it looked like when people were first arriving:
Just lovely. No doubt, what people were expecting from Phil Robertson was a rousing call to prayer, if not a call to actual arms, along with a few jabs at President Obama and maybe at the culture in general, warrior that Robertson is in that field. So picture it: All these gathered white people dining in the morning, ready for a great time.
And then Robertson got up and spun out a tale of a fantasy atheist husband and father whose home is invaded by two men who rape his atheist daughters, cut off his atheist wife's head, slice off his atheist dick, and mock him by saying that there is no right and wrong because they don't believe in God.
Yeah, that would have been just hilarious to see, the Rude Pundit thought. All those faces gagging on their scrambled eggs. But if you listen to the whole talk? The image of raped little girls and castration was the way Robertson started his sermon. He had another half-hour or more to go, and the audience didn't get up and walk out. The dining pray-people didn't shout him down or say he was wrong. Oh, no, no, no. They listened. Later in the talk, they laughed and cheered and shouted, "Amen!" and applauded. Phil Robertson didn't alienate the crowd by asking them to picture a vicious crime against nonbelievers. He was speaking their language.
It doesn't even occur to the crowd that what Robertson was saying is beyond some kind of rhetorical pale, let alone impolite breakfast talk. It doesn't occur to Robertson that, really, one can decide that rape and murder and mutilation are wrong without the framework of religion.
So, instead, let's put this out into the universe: A man breaks into Phil Robertson's house and rapes him after tying up Robertson's wife, Kay. Over the next few days, the man rapes the shit out of Robertson, again and again, always in front of Kay. When Robertson's sons try to check on him, the man grabs them and ties them up, using a nail gun to pin their dicks to their chairs. And he rapes Robertson repeatedly, even using various implements to rape him - a duck call, a model duck, a stuffed duck. He just keeps raping Phil Robertson, in the face, in the ass. Sometimes he jacks off on Robertson to mix it up a bit, all while the Duck Dynasty clan watches the rapes and hears their patriarch's cries and moans and, yes, prayers. Finally, before he sets the house on fire and leaves, the exhausted rapist says something.
Now here in our little parable for the damned, the Rude Pundit is conflicted. He can end it with the man saying one of two things.
The man could say, "How come your god didn't stop this from happening?" But that seems too easy, not enough of a mind-rape, too easily dismissed as the madness of the atheist.
How about: Robertson, smelling gasoline, tearfully asks why this has happened. And the man says, "Because God told me to."
