The comments I've read here have implied that Phil Robertson was in on some kind of conspiracy with A&E to make them all more money.
I'm sorry, but I find that ridiculous.
Anyone suggesting a 'wag the dog' scenario is indulging in some sort of conspiratorial fantasy.
Just because you cannot imagine it does not mean that it didn't happen. I'm not saying that it
did happen, I'm just saying that it could have happened and that from our perspective, standing on the outside looking in, there is no real way to tell which scenario actually happened; the most we can do is argue probabilities.
You also damn Mr. Robertson with faint praise because you're essentially saying that he's a naif, an innocent who simply doesn't have the wherewithal to be crafty or ingenious; I don't think you get to Mr. Robertson's position without being a lot more sophisticated than he lets on. And that doesn't mean that I'm saying he lied - I don't think he did - the beauty of this set of events is that Mr. Robertson told the truth, and that doesn't change if A&E and Robertson agreed that it might prove profitable if he really let it all hang out in that interview. That's the real sophistication in this sort of wag-the-dog - and I am just assuming wag-the-dog for the sake of argument here - it was precisely by being as real as possible that he managed to get such a knee-jerk reaction out of GLAAD - more real than he is on the show itself, which necessarily contains a lot of scripted content. And that's the thing about it: there is no need to ascribe any sordid motive to Mr. Robertson in order for things to have played out this way. In fact, you could even cast this as a form of testifying by Mr. Robertson: telling the truth of God the way it is; the fact that it might have also provided him and A&E some material benefit as well is not necessarily relevant because it wouldn't have been 100% certain that GLAAD would in fact react the way they did.
To paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane: "reality is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
Let's give Mr. Robertson his due.