A Republican congressional candidate in Illinois puts ‘Duck Dynasty’ patriarch Phil Robertson on par with Rosa Parks.

In a fundraising email to supporters, Ian Bayne, who is running in the Republican primary to challenge Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) in the 11th District, compared Robertson to Rosa Parks. The fundraising email began: “Today, Ian Bayne called Phil Robertson, star of the A&E series “Duck Dynasty,” the ‘Rosa Parks’ of our generation.”

Robertson has been in national headlines lately for ranting about the “sin” of homosexuality in an interview with GQ. In that same interview Robertson also discussed the welfare of African Americans during the era of Jim Crow. He said that during that time blacks were carefree and essentially didn’t experience any mistreatment.

“In December 1955, Rosa Parks took a stand against an unjust societal persecution of black people, and in December 2013, Robertson took a stand against persecution of Christians,” Bayne wrote in the email. “What Parks did was courageous.”

Bayne added in the email that “what Robertson did was courageous too.”

Here is what Robertson said in the GQ interview:

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. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field. … 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.

(H/t: Huffington Post)

This post was updated.