Those who know “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson — or have listened to him speak — shouldn’t be surprised by his recent anti-gay statements.
Earlier this year, during a candid moment with a female Post reporter, he asked whether she was seeing anyone.
When she said no, he responded, “Must be hard in New York — what with all them gays.”
Robertson’s opinions about gays and religion were so widely known, in fact, that members of his family are accusing the A&E network of “hanging him out to dry” — setting up an inflammatory interview with GQ magazine just so they could punish him.
Sick of the Robertsons and their Christian beliefs, liberal television executives at A&E manipulated the situation to control the Louisiana family, the Daily Mail reported, quoting sources within the clan.
The sources claim that not only has the network exploited the controversy to throw the conservative family under the bus, but that it could have prevented the whole fiasco from the get-go.
An A&E representative was with Robertson, 67, during his GQ chat and easily could have pulled the plug before his comments about gays became public.
“You have to ask yourself why this interview happened and why it ever became public. Someone from A&E was there and was aware of the kind of answers Phil was giving,” one source said. “But despite that, they didn’t ever try to stop it or control it. Instead, they let it hit the headlines and then released a statement condemning it.”
The source also pointed out that the whole premise of the reality show — from the network’s perspective, at least — was mocking the conservative Southerners it depicted.
“When the TV executives came up with the concept for the show, they wanted it to be a case of people laughing at a bunch of backward rednecks,” the source said.
“But when it didn’t turn out like that and people actually started identifying with the way the family behaved and were laughing with them, not at them, they became uncomfortable. It did not sit well with the New York TV types.”
Representatives from A&E did not return calls from The Post.
Robertson and his show came under fire from gay-rights groups after he talked about homosexuality and bestiality in the same breath.
“It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus,” he was quoted by GQ as saying. “But, hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical . . . Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men.”