While stumping in Iowa for Ted Cruz on Sunday, “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson declared that gay marriage is a sign of growing “depravity” and “perversion” in America.
Robertson, notorious for his racist and anti-gay remarks, said of marriage equality: “It is evil, it’s wicked, it’s sinful and they want us to swallow it.”
“We have to run this bunch out of Washington D.C.,” Robertson said. “We have to rid the earth of them. Get them out of there.”
Cruz followed Robertson on stage, calling the reality TV star “a joyful, cheerful, unapologetic voice of truth.”
In an interview with Fox News, also on Sunday, Robertson said that Ted Cruz “loves James Madison,” whom he claimed said that the U.S. is based “on the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves based on the Ten Commandments of God.”
Robertson may want to brush up on his history, as the “Ten Commandments” quote he cites is actually fake.
The myth-busting website Snopes points out that “this statement appears nowhere in the writings or recorded utterances of James Madison and is completely contradictory to his character as a strong proponent of the separation of church and state.”
“We did not find anything in our files remotely like the sentiment expressed in the extract you sent us,” the curators of the Madison Papers at the University of Virginia told Americans United for Separation of Church and State when they looked into the fake quote in 2013. “In addition, the idea is inconsistent with everything we know about Madison's views on religion and government, views which he expressed time and time again in public and in private.”
