Among the many, many controversial things Mike Huckabee has said in recent years, he’s still facing questions about his belief that wives should “graciously submit” to a husband’s “leadership.”
If you’re just joining us, in 1998, Huckabee was one of 131 signatories to a full page USA Today Ad which declared, “I affirm the statement on the family issued by the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention.” The SBC’s family statement insisted, “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.” The ad Huckabee signed specifically said of the SBC family statement, “You are right because you called wives to graciously submit to their husband’s sacrificial leadership.”
The subject came up at a recent Fox News debate, and Huckabee seemed to already have a response in mind: “The point is that as wives submit themselves to the husbands, the husbands also submit themselves, and it’s not a matter of one being somehow superior over the other.”
See? Huckabee and the Southern Baptists just want spouses to be submissive to one another. What’s so controversial about that? Oddly enough, plenty.
According to [Richard Land, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission], the statement says that while the husband and wife are equal before God, “the wife does not get veto power over the husband’s decision.”
“Somebody has to be in charge,” Land explained. “The Bible says the husband is in charge.” While the husband should “solicit his wife’s views,” ultimately “he is going to make the decision.”
The reason, Land said, is that Southern Baptists believe that “God holds the husband accountable for the household.”
The Rev. Alan Brehm, who was a Southern Baptist theologian teaching at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1998, said Huckabee isn’t telling the truth and that the statement endorsed by Huckabee “was not open to interpretation.”
It’s a two-fer — Huckabee was wrong in signing the statement in 1998, and he was wrong to lie about in 2008.
And as long as we’re talking about Huckabee, remember yesterday’s controversy about his desire to change the Constitution to fit “God’s standards”? Alan Colmes asked Huckabee about the comments last night.
COLMES: All right, Governor, you made a statement at a rally in Michigan within the last 24 hours. You said, I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. You said, I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it’d be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do.” That makes people a little worried. It sounds like you’re looking to have a theocratic state when you make statements like that…
HUCKABEE: Not at all…. On two things. The context is two things, human life amendment, which I support and which has been in the Republican platform since 1980. And by the way, Fred Thompson doesn’t support it, nor does John McCain.
And yet it’s part of our platform. And it’s a very important part of our platform to say that human life is something we’re going to stand for. And the second thing is traditional marriage.
So those are the two areas which I’m talking about. I’m not suggesting that we rewrite the Constitution to reflect tithing or Sunday school attendance. I want to make that very clear.
I see. So, Huckabee doesn’t want to make the Constitution fit “God’s standards” in general, he just wants to make the Constitution fit “God’s standards” when it comes to gays and reproductive rights. I feel better already.
OK, one more Huckabee item. ThinkProgress noted that the former governor’s newest senior advisor, James Pinkerton, has quite a colorful rhetorical history, including calling for putting “a cop in front of every mosque” and blaming Republican corruption in Texas on the state’s “proximity to Mexico.”
I assume we can now look forward to a Richard Cohen column, blasting Mike Huckabee for not having condemned his own aide’s dumb comments?