Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson admits people have good reasons to dislike him — those reasons just aren’t his opinions about homosexuality and race.
“I don’t worry too much about people hating or insulting me,” the unPHILtered: The Way I See It author told Us Weekly. “I’m a sinful man, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes. People have reason to hate me.”
Still, as he has for the past nine months, Phil stood by the controversial comments he made to GQ.
“All I did was quote a passage of scripture from antiquity,” Phil said. “They’re mad at me, but I’m really just quoting what God said, so He’s the one they have a problem with.”
During GMA on Tuesday, Phil took that argument one step farther when asked whether he considers himself to be a homophobe.
“I’m as much of a homophobe as Jesus was,” he said. “The people who are participating in homosexual behavior, they need to know that I love them.”
Of the part in the controversial GQ interview where he said African-Americans were always “singing and happy” in the “pre-entitlement” era, Phil told Us that comment was based on his experience working on a Louisiana cotton farm in the 1960s.
“The point I was making was that even when our black brothers didn’t have their civil rights, those people had that one thing the government couldn’t take from them: their faith. They would sing spiritual songs as they were going across those cotton fields,” he said. “Old Jesse [Jackson] got mad at me and said something about how I was a Jim Crow and a racist. We don’t look at people like black, white, and brown. We’re all members of the human race.”
The seventh season of Duck Dynasty is reportedly in production.
