It appears that this Duck Dynasty controversy has really touched a nerve with the people at Fox News, who consider it “a purge of southern white Christian patriotic culture” to suspend a man for arguing that blacks were happy before they got civil rights and comparing homosexuality to bestiality.

What’s sad is that these people are actually asking us to associate pro-Jim Crow and anti-gay thoughts with “southern white patriotic culture.”

Then they’ll turn on a dime and say that they aren’t racist and don’t “hate” gays.

Look, if you want to define yourself that way then don’t complain when we describe you that way. You have your ideas about what it means to be American and I have mine. I think your ideas are the farthest thing from “patriotic” and I’d like to be generous enough to the Christian religion to insist that your ideas aren’t “Christian,” either.

And then there’s the free speech issue, where conservatives seem to think that employers have to tolerate any kind of speech or it’s a violation of the First Amendment. The First Amendment prevents the government from suppressing what you say, but it doesn’t mean you can tell your boss to “fuck off” and keep your job. Likewise, you can’t anger your boss’s customers by saying stuff that they find offensive and think that the Bill of Rights protects you and gives you the right to be on television.

Here’s what is going on. Back in 1963, George Wallace could say “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in his inaugural speech and get wild applause. Ten years later, that was unacceptable. No one suppressed anyone’s speech, but some previously acceptable speech became non-respectable. Politicians learned that they would not be rewarded for being openly racist anymore and so they stopped being openly racist. Something similar is going on now with respect to gays and lesbians. You can still say rude, nasty, and hateful things about gays and lesbians, but there is no reward in it. Fewer and fewer people laugh at your jokes, and it turns off more voters than it attracts.

In both cases, something key to the nature of southern culture was stamped out, not by the law but by simple shame. To be sure, the law was important, too, but not for the speech part of it. What’s terrifying the folks at Fox News is not government oppression, but the realization that another big element of their culture is no longer respectable in polite society.