Even some people here are charmed by Mike Huckabee. And why not? He chats amiably with pundits like Tim Russert, humorously discussing his squirrel-eating college days. He's appeared on Colbert Report, promising to make Stephen Colbert his vice president if he wins the nomination. His economic populism and apparent desire to fight poverty are a breath of fresh air after the soak-the-poor ethos of the Bush years.
But none of this should disguise the fact that Mike Huckabee espouses a reactionary, fundamentalist worldview that can only be described as "batshit insane."
I have provided below a sampler of colorful quotes from Huckabee's own mouth that I think best embody his extremism.
Huckabee on abortion:
The standard Republican line on abortion is that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, leaving the question of abortion's legality to the states. Huckabee goes one step further and advocates for the federal criminalization of abortion in the strongest terms:
"It's the logic of the Civil War," Huckabee said Sunday, comparing abortion rights to slavery. "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."
You heard it right. Mike Huckabee compared abortion to slavery. For him, banning abortion would be morally equivalent to the Emancipation Proclamation.
By alluding to the Civil War, he implies that opponents of legalized abortion are justified in resorting to extreme violence to get their way--something which they do not need to be encouraged to do, given the history of terrorist acts committed against abortion providers by the most rabid members of the anti-abortion movement.
Huckabee on AIDS:
In 1992, when it was well understood that HIV could only be spread by blood-to-blood contact or sexual activity, Huckabee wrote the following:
"If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague.
"It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents."
Huckabee was given the opportunity to retract this statement in 2007. Incredibly, he refused, lamely claiming he had never said he favored quarantining AIDS patients:
"Now, would I say things a little differently in 2007? Probably so," Huckabee told Fox News. "But I'm not going to recant or retract from the statement that I did make because, again, the point was not saying we ought to lock people up who have HIV/AIDS."
Huckabee did not explain how individuals with HIV would have been isolated.
In Huckabee's neo-medieval worldview, AIDS = leprosy; like lepers, AIDS patients are being punished by God for their sinful deeds, and need to be kept out of the sight of righteous God-fearing folk. The civil rights of AIDS patients are to be completely ignored because of the risk that they might spread their "sin" to the innocent.
A President Huckabee would order the construction of concentration camps for the imprisonment of homosexuals, IV drug users, and other "sinners" to keep them from public view.
Huckabee on the separation of church and state:
Mike Huckabee openly wants to do away with the separation of church and state, and render what is Caesar's unto God:
"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."
Amazingly, this open call for theocracy has gone virtually undiscussed by the media. The separation of church and state was so important to the Founders that they enshrined it in the First Amendment, and yet no one seems to care that a presidential candidate is openly proposing to abolish it.
Huckabee on science
On this matter Huckabee is again ahead--or is that behind?--the rest of his party. When asked if he did not believe in evolution during one of the debates, Huckabee raised his hand to indicate that he did not.
During the first GOP presidential debate last month in California, three Republican candidates raised eyebrows by indicating they did not subscribe to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
When the topic came up again Tuesday night in a CNN-sponsored debate in New Hampshire, one of those evolution skeptics, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, offered a spirited defense of the biblical creation narrative.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth," said Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister. "A person either believes that God created the process or believes that it was an accident and that it just happened all on its own."
Huckabee also said that if Americans "want a president who doesn't believe in God, there's probably plenty of choices. But if I'm selected as president of this country, they'll have one who believes in those words that God did create."
He went on to quote Martin Luther: " 'Here I stand, I can do no other.' And I will not take that back."
Huckabee later added, "If anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it."
In fact, Huckabee did not think his beliefs on evolution were even a legitimate question:
"It's interesting that that question would even be asked of somebody running for president," Huckabee said. "I'm not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book. I'm asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States."
Huckabee doesn't think a president needs to take science into account to run the country. Facts, data, the scientific method--none of these things are relevant to the president, as long as he stays faithful to his chosen creed. This kind of dogmatic anti-intellectualism is incompatible with running a modern, technological nation.
Why should we care? He's never going to get the nomination.
There is a slim but still real possibility that Huckabee may be on the Republican ticket as McCain's vice-president. And neither his amiable disposition nor his apparently populist economic programs--which turn out to be a blatant fraud--should blind us to his extremism.
If Huckabee becomes the nominee for the presidency or even the vice presidency, he might well become the Barry Goldwater of the Christian right--lose in a landslide because of his extremist positions, but inspire a new, fervent generation of Christian fundamentalists to enter politics. And as Goldwater's followers did with Ronald Reagan, Huckabee's supporters might someday elect a president far more extreme than Huckabee himself.
To prevent that from happening, we must spread the word about what Huckabee truly represents--a repressive, neo-medieval dogma that has no place in governing a 21st century nation.