Huckabee Clears Up Civil Union Confusion

Republican Mike Huckabee has once again had to clarify queer comments…

The presidential hopeful reportedly once endorsed state-sanction civil unions. Upon hearing this news, however, he made sure to clear up any confusion. From a Concord Monitor:

A comment he made in a meeting with Monitor editors in August 2006 has also drawn scrutiny. As Huckabee has risen from an asterisk to leading the polls in Iowa, the news media – and his opponents – have seized on his suggestion then that he supported state-level civil unions.

“I would tend to leave (the question of civil unions) to the state, as long as they wanted to not call it a marriage,” Huckabee said in 2006. “Now if they’d call it a marriage, then I’d have a problem with it.”

When he returned to the Monitor this month, he was asked to clarify his position.

“I’ve never supported civil unions, and I don’t,” Huckabee said. “I don’t know, honestly, how I said what I said (in 2006) other than, ‘Hey, that’s something New Hampshire has to deal with.’ ”

Huckabee said civil unions are a “precursor to same-sex marriage.” In some ways, he said, they’re the same because to dissolve one, a couple would essentially divorce. Huckabee added he’s not familiar with the specifics of New Hampshire’s law, because he’s never “been interested in a civil union myself.”

The Monitor op-ed also explores Huckabee’s political style: rather than using social issues as a wedge, he preferred to leave such matters up to spokesmen and other third parties. As Rita Sklar of the ACLU says, “He is hardly ever outright nasty. But he is suggestively nasty.” Either way you cut it, though, Mike Huckabee’s a nasty boy.