Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) on Monday admitted that she reflexively started defending Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson without ever reading the GQ interview where he compared homosexuality to bestiality and said that African-Americans were happy before they had civil rights.

In his controversial interview with GQ, Robertson had talked about sin: “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.”

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“It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus,” he said.

He also claimed that he had never seen a black person mistreated in the South during the Jim Crow era.

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once,” Robertson insisted. “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.”

After the A&E network suspended Robertson from his show, Palin took to her Facebook page to opine that “[f]ree speech is an endangered species. Those ‘intolerants’ hatin’ and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us.”

Fox News host Greta Van Susteren pointed out to Palin on Monday that some “people” were misusing the term “free speech, meaning that you jump someone for saying something and that you don’t jump others.”

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“But if the market wants to be such that people don’t want to watch someone, then so be it,” the Fox News host said.

“That’s right,” Palin replied. “That’s why I say attorneys can discuss and argue whether it’s a legal free speech issue or not.”

“It’s one thing to express your opinion,” Van Susteren noted. “Do you have any problem, you know, about the manners of how he said it. We don’t talk about it on television much, but if you actually the read article, there’s a rather and offensive — at least, I think — offensive description of it. You know, there are two ways to say different things, and in the article and I know he’s a graphic type guy, but do you have any objection on the manners aspect, how he said it?”

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“I haven’t read the article,” Palin admitted, clearing her throat. “I don’t know exactly how he said it. But, Greta, what he was doing was in response to a question about a lifestyle that he disagrees with. And yet he has said over and over again, he doesn’t hate the person engaging in a lifestyle he disagrees with. But in response, he was quoting the Gospel.”

“So people who are so insulted and offended by what he said, evidently, are offended by what he was quoting in the Gospel. So that’s another interesting aspect in all of this.”

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Watch this video from Fox News’ On the 1Record/me>, broadcast Dec. 23, 2013.