It’s been days since we learned about another intemperate, intolerant remark from Mike Huckabee before he became a presidential candidate, so I suppose we were due for a new round of revelations. Mother Jones’ David Corn delivers.
To briefly recap, the past couple of weeks have been painfully revealing for the former Arkansas governor. In 1998, he supported a statement that called on “wives to graciously submit to their husband’s sacrificial leadership.” He wanted to quarantine AIDS patients. He believed homosexuality could “pose a dangerous public health risk.” He said that if a man and a woman live together outside of marriage, they’re engaging in a “demeaning … alternate lifestyle.” He claimed intervention from God in his successful 1993 special election in Arkansas’ race for lieutenant governor. In a 1990 speech, Huckabee said, “It doesn’t embarrass me one bit to let you know that I believe Adam and Eve were real people.” In 1997, Huckabee refused to sign legislation to assist storm victims because the measure referred to tornadoes and floods as “acts of God.” In 1998, Huckabee spoke at the National Pastors’ Conference and implored the group to “take this nation back for Christ.”
There’s almost certainly more, but Huckabee and his campaign refuse to release copies of the sermons he delivered from his pulpit.
Nevertheless, the hits just keep on coming. David Corn took a look at a book Huckabee wrote as governor in 1998, called “Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence,” and found a “fierce culture warrior.” Among the “cultural conflicts” Huckabee descried:
Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities.
It gets worse.
A few pages later, the reader learns:
It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations — from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia.
The point of “Kids Who Kill” — which Huckabee has not emphasized on the campaign trail, perhaps afraid someone might read it — was for the then-governor to denounce the “demoralization of America,” and a country that he said “seems to be disintegrating before our very eyes.”
And what did he mean by that? Well, his book denounces no-fault divorce, women’s equality in the workforce, and these perceived social ills:
The legal commitment of ideological secularism to any and all of the fanatically twisted fringes of American culture — pornographers, gay activists, abortionists, and other professional liberationists — is a pathetically self-defeating crusade that has confused liberty with license.
The irony, of course, is that Huckabee obviously felt quite strongly about being a culture warrior at the time, but is trying to characterize himself as a friendly neighbor now. Corn pointed to these Huckabee comments in the most recent presidential debate. After Mitt Romney cited a series of specific policy goals for his administration, Huckabee added:
“Reality is, none of that’s going to happen till we bring this country back together. I think the first priority of the next president is to be a president of all the United States. We are, right now, a very polarized country, and that polarized country has led to a paralyzed government. We’ve got Democrats who fight Republicans, liberals fighting conservatives. The left fights the right. Who’s fighting for this country again?”
Given his track record, Huckabee seems to have helped create that polarization by denouncing everyone who shares a competing worldview. It’s a little late to run on a “bring the people together” platform, don’t you think?