If Robertson’s views on female sexuality and servitude had been made public first, the Right could be more properly scandalized. The idea that a young woman is ripe for bedding before she can drive has connotations about that side of a romanticized rustic culture that, even for white people, is decidedly less appealing than the hearth-and-heart, God-and-guns milieu that the earlier Robertson defenders harkened to.

Also, they could blame Miley Cyrus. In a vacuum, conservatives could to spin the apparent marriageability of female children as yet another piece of evidence for the degradation of culture and validation of the right’s embrace of permanent victim status – “Dammit, things didn’t used to be this way!”

Roberts’ initial interview resonated so deeply with conservatives because it fit with the narrative they mutter to themselves daily: “Things used to be better, and once we’re all dead you’ll see we were right all along.” Gay sinners in the closet, darkies picking and grinning on the porch, America the way God (their very particular and peculiar God) meant it to be.