Hey, look! Phil Robertson’s back with another questionable opinion, this time concerning civil rights.

In 2013, Robertson told GQ, “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them … They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — Not a word! … Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

The assertion was that before the Civil War, black people were actually happier and better off.

Robertson tried to clarify the statement in an interview a year later, telling US Weekly, “I was just giving my experience. The point I was making was that even when our black brothers didn’t have their civil rights, those people had that one thing the government couldn’t take from them: their faith. They would sing spiritual songs as they were going across those cotton fields.”

Sure, maybe they had their faith, but they weren’t treated like equal citizens. Why is this so hard to understand?