Dumb Little Charlys.

When I was a senior in high school I was in the play Flowers for Algernon. For those of you who are not familiar with the play (which was made into the movie Charly in 1968), it is the story of a mentally handicapped man who undergoes surgery that makes him a genius – albeit temporarily.

Charly worked in a bakery where he was a friend with the other employees. The other employees showed their friendship by teasing him and playing jokes on him. Once Charly became smarter those signs of friendship no longer worked, and the other employees stopped being Charly’s friends.

In 2012, the A&E Network premiered a program called Duck Dynasty. This is a reality program featuring a family from the bayou country of Louisiana. If you have ever watched a reality show, you know that each episode the producers manufacture some sort of asinine controversy between the people on the show. While I have never watched Duck Dynasty, I have read that the Robertson family never went for that. Instead, they showed a close-knit family that held to traditional values. The producers would bleep out words to make it sound as though the Robertson used foul language -- which they do not. Recently, the Roberstons were told to tone down the mention of Jesus as it was offensive to muslims. They refused. Now the big brouhaha is that the patriarch of the family took a traditional stand against homosexuality during an interview for GQ magazine. As a result, Phil Robertson has been suspended, if not fired, from the program.

I cannot help but think that as long as the Robertsons played dumb little Charlys, at whom the enlightened elite could laugh, there would be no problem. Instead, however, the Roberstons upset things by sticking to their values. Rather than allow themselves to be laughed at, the Robertsons struck a chord with many people.

 Last weekend at work, I was displaying some sunglasses that were on sale. Among them were the Duck Commander sunglasses. I did not realize how popular that program, or the people on it, was. One man who looked closely at those sunglasses was wearing a Duck Dynasty hat. I can’t tell you how many times I heard people saying that it was “cool” that there were Duck Commander sunglasses.

The left is very open-minded to opinions, as long as those opinions follow the party line. If an opinion does not, then the person expressing that opinion must be destroyed. It is time that this nonsense ended.