West Columbia, S.C. — Less than 24-hours before the South Carolina Republican primary, in an airplane hangar at the Columbia airport, the Duck Commander, Phil Robertson, was discoursing on STDs.
“You wanna mess with the All Mighty?” he boomed, dressed in a camouflage green shirt, a bandana wrapped around his long hair alongside the sunglasses which he pushed off a minute into his speech.
Incidence, prevalence, and cost of sexually transmitted infections in the United States. You want to legalize unnatural acts, sexual acts? Men and women just decided what marriage was, you say. What does the CDC say about morality? About 50.5 million current infections are in men alone. While 59.5 million are in women. For a total of 110 million of Americans with STDs at any given time.
“You reap what you sow!” a man shouted from the audience.
“You reap what you sow, the man said. Don’t you get it? That’s fact. You want to argue with the Center for Disease Control? Go ahead,” Robertson said. “One out of three of us are carrying a disease that’s sexually transmitted. There are now 39 million deceased. 36 million have the disease, HIV, AIDS. God says, ‘don’t do that.’ Clean woman, clean man, they marry, they keep their sex between the two of them, you won’t get a sexually transmitted disease, ever.”
“God was right all along,” he said.
Robertson’s stem-winder was an introduction for Ted Cruz, whose candidacy faces a crucial test tomorrow. South Carolina, a state rife with evangelical and tea party voters, should be fertile ground for Cruz’s strategy of uniting the conservative base, and he needs a strong showing. Taking the stage after Robertson spoke for about 20 minutes — “You say, Phil,” he said, “you ever been high, been drunk and been laid? That’d be yeah. But if I started interviewing each one of you, and you told me what you’d been up to, what do you think South Carolina? Six foot hold. Sinners” — Cruz seemed almost demur as he cheerfully preached the doom and gloom that would occur if a liberal Justice were confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Robertson, more colorfully, spoke to some of the topics that Cruz has emphasized over the past several days in South Carolina: faith and Second Amendment rights.
“What brought us here, South Carolina? You know what brought us here. Look back 240 years. Bibles and guns. Right? We had to have faith in God almighty that he would bless us; he would found the greatest nation on earth. But we had to have the firepower to send the Brits and King George III back where he came from,” Robertson boomed.
Cruz, during his speech, suggested Robertson should perhaps have a role in politics after the election was over.
“Here’s a thought experiment for you: Imagine Phil Robertson as Ambassador to the United Nations,” Cruz said. “How much would you pay to see that?”