Did presidential candidate Mike Huckabee compare gay marriage to slavery? Washington Blade journalist Rebecca Armendariz says “Eh, maybe…”
Consider this exchange from Fox News Sunday:
Host Chris Wallace: Now, Thompson and McCain both talk about leaving abortion and gay marriage to the states, the way, in the case of abortion, it was before Roe vs. Wade ever became the law of the land in the first place. Why isn’t that good enough, basically making this a federal issue and leaving it up to each state?
Mike Huckabee: Well, it’s the logic of the Civil War. If morality is the point here, and if it’s right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can’t have 50 different versions of what’s right and what’s wrong.
Again, that’s what the whole Civil War was about. Can you have states saying slavery is OK, other states saying it’s not?
If abortion is a moral issue – and for many of us it is, and I know for others it’s not. So if you decide that it’s just a political issue, then that’s a perfectly acceptable, logical conclusion.
But for those of us for whom this is a moral question, you can’t simply have 50 different versions of what’s right.
The crux of Armendariz’s confusion comes in Huckabees singular phrasing: “This is a moral question,” which leads the well-intentioned journalist to wonder whether he’s referring to abortion and to gay marriage, or simply abortion. Armendariz writes:
Was Huckabee lumping the two of them together? He says “this is a moral question” and not “these are moral questions.” While he’s not exactly a champion for gay rights, is it logical for us to believe that he was comparing the right to keep slaves to the right for gays to marry? I’m unsure.
We’re not sure, either, but we really doubt it. It seems to us that Huckabee simply wanted to discuss federalism, which, we agree, doesn’t make any sense when dealing with national rights. The slavery analogy ain’t anything new: right-wing folk have been using it for years. In their minds, invoking slavery – which is bad, of course – reminds Americans that we need to have universal laws, as our forefathers proved with abolition. Unfortunately, in Huckabee’s Republican world, that argument can be used against gay people: states should not be able to create their own marriage laws. We need an overarching, all encompassing rule on gay nuptials. While we understand Huckabee’s rationale, we wish he would use it for good instead of evil.
As for the slavery debate: Armendariz submitted a clarification question to the Huckabee camp. We’re not holding our breath for a response.
How about we take this to the next level?
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ProfessorVP
I really wish Queerty, and everybody else, would stop saying “gay marriage.” It’s same-sex marriage. It gives the impression that there are two totally different concepts of marriage. One is about love, commitment, bills to pay, mortgages, family budgeting, and responsibility. The other is about fucking.
Homer Simpson
Oh come on… he was specifically asked about Roe vs. Wade, so he was comparing abortion to slavery, not same-sex-marriage. Whether being owned by another person or killed before you have a chance to live is a far cry of a difference from just receiving just a small tax benefit (which the issue would become mute after FairTax is passed).
mozzer13
That doesn’t make him any less of a fuckwad, Homey. If you think he’s going to look at the gays any differently than he does abortion, you are seriously fooling yourself. Also, equal marriage rights is about a bit more than a small tax benefit. We won’t even get into the “Fair” Tax, aka Let’s shift most of the tax burden to people who can’t afford it.
jack jett
I bet Chuck Norris fucks him in his gastric bypass ass…….
If Huckabee is the next President, then we are in serious trouble.
jack jett
patrick lehman
I love all of it. Mike is drawing a parallel I happen to disagree with, but it is a valid point. Shared secular values (or morals) are what SHOULD bind us a a culture, and a nation.If we look at our behavior through a moral lens, we should do so as a nation, not a collection of states. Mike is a baptist and a looney. But at least he articulates what he believes in a clear way. His error is that he wants to impose what is a religious interpretation of my value to a civic level. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. His existence sucks campaign funds from the republican front runners, and rightly paints the ‘states rights’ advocates as a bunch of panderers. I have a clearer sense of what he actually thinks than I do of any other republicans.
Bill Perdue
The Democrats presidential clown car is full of slick, slicker and slickest versions of the same oily type. They all have deeply cemented connections to big business, lack the courage or the ability to end the war and they all pander to bigots.
The Republican clown car is different; its occupants are sick, sicker and sickest. Sickest of all is Giuliani, connected not just to big business but to gangsters through his partner Kerik. McCain, who is panting to pay back the Vietnamese by murdering Iraqis falls into the ‘Sicker’ category.
Huckabee is somewhere between sickest and sicker. An article by Matt Taibbi, a writer for Rolling Stone, describes Huckabee as representing “… a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic populism. Rather than employing the patented Bush-Rove tactic of using abortion and gay rights to hoodwink low-income Christians into supporting patrician, pro-corporate policies, Huckabee is a bigger-government Republican who emphasizes prison reform and poverty relief. In the world of GOP politics, he represents something entirely new — a cross between John Edwards and Jerry Falwell, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher who actually seems to give a shit about the working poor.â€
Politicians like Huckabee abounded in the depression period and were a sign that politics were being realigned along the lines of class against class and profoundly shaken up, events mirrored by today’s political situation. Democrats Father Coughlin and Huey Long both combined religious superstition and populist demagoguery and attracted large followings.
Beyond his populism though, we have to keep in mind that Huckabee, like Hillary Clinton is profoundly religious. Matt Taibbi again. “He believes the Earth may be only 6,000 years old, angrily rejects the evidence that human beings evolved from ‘primates’ and thinks America wouldn’t need so much Mexican labor if we allowed every aborted fetus to grow up and enter the workforce. This God stuff isn’t just talk with Huck. One of his first acts as governor was to block Medicaid from funding an abortion for a mentally retarded teenager who had been raped by her stepfather — an act in direct violation of federal law, which requires states to pay for abortions in cases of rape. “The state didn’t fund a single such abortion while Huckabee was governor,” says Dr. William Harrison of the Fayetteville Women’s Clinic. “Zero.”
Huckabee, a southern baptist, worked for gay bashing evangelist James Robison who claims that ‘gays seduce and kill children’. He supports the FairTax plan which would abolish progressive income taxes and replace them by a very regressive 23 federal sales taxes. The rich would soon get much, much richer and the poor would get much poorer.
The time is not yet ripe for rightwing populists like Huckabee but as standards of living take a nosedive and the war increasingly destabilizes the nation American politics will begin splintering and fracturing. It will likely be years from now but when the preshocks are relplaced by quakes we have to have an independent political voice and a party ready and able to take on the rightists and centrists and end their rule forever.
Right now both those requirements can be met if we join and build the labor union founded and funded US Labor Party.
Jason
I suggest you choose Dr. Ron Paul for an alternate choice, then. While he is a staunch Christian like the rest, next to Kucinich, he’s your best chance of making sure everyone of all races, sexes, and orientations is treated fairly – because he promotes the individual, and not groups.
If individual rights are secured, then everyone is covered.
Wendy
Jason,
Ron Paul is not for individual rights if he’s anti-choice.
Lillian
Hey ProffessorVP, do you think that smae-sex marriage wouldn’t eveolve marriage, bill paying and love as well. God, they might even have adopted children! I guess that would scare the living crap out of you right? Two loving people raising a child in a stable normal home.
Gregg
Lillian – VP lives in his own world where his own rules apply. He doesn’t even realize that the appropriate phrase would be “marriage equality”.
Roxie
The really odd thing is that ever since I heard Ron Paul saying “let the states decide”, I’ve screaming “Oh, like they did with slavery? Yeah, that worked out SO well!” *eyeroll*