Mike Huckabee
Mike Huckabee is not done talking. Immediately after the Supreme Court decision in favor of nationwide marriage equality, the former Arkansas governor and far-right presidential candidate
went fire and brimstone, saying "I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch. We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat." Now he's moved from the language of the American Revolution to that of the
civil rights and anti-war movements, saying of pastors and Christian schools that:
“They will go the path of Dr. Martin Luther King, who in his brilliant essay the letters from a Birmingham jail reminded us, based on what St. Augustine said, that an unjust law is no law at all. And I do think that we're going to see a lot of pastors who will have to make this tough decision,” he continued.
Huckabee went on to add Christian business owners, university presidents, school administrators and even county clerks who grant marriage licenses to the list of individuals likely to buck the ruling.
“If they have a conscientious objection, I think they should be excused,” he said.
Let's talk about these comparisons a little. First off, Huckabee is fudging the situation more than a little when he talks like pastors and actual religious institutions are going to face legal pressure to embrace equality. But he's doing that in order to confuse the issue of county clerks claiming personal religious objections to doing the work of being a county clerk and issuing marriage licenses. That's rather a different situation than being an employee of a religious institution.
Second, let's discuss Martin Luther King Jr. and conscientious objector status. Both of these are great examples of how you have to be prepared to sacrifice for your beliefs, which is exactly the opposite of what Huckabee is calling for here. King, after all, wrote that letter from the Birmingham jail, and life wasn't all chocolates and flowers for conscientious objectors. Take World War II, when more than 6,000 conscientious objectors were jailed and another 12,000 went into Civilian Public Service:
By the time CPS ended in 1947, CPS men had logged over 8 million man-days of work in over 150 camps. The C.O.s were not paid and their families and churches contributed over 7 million dollars for their support. The CPSers worked at a variety of projects, including conservation, forestry, and agricultural, and as government survey teams. Others built sanitary facilities for hook-worm ridden communities, or worked with juvenile delinquents. Some wished to do more risky things (in part, to prove that they were just as courageous as the men going into combat) and volunteered as firefighters, or as human guinea pigs for medical and scientific research in jaundice (infectious hepatitis), typhus, infantile paralysis, pneumonia, influenza, starvation, sea sickness, immersion and frostbite, and fly abatement experiments.
If that's the model that county clerks opposed to marriage equality want to follow, fine. But whether they're following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr. or conscientious objectors, it entails sacrifice, and sacrifice is not what Huckabee is talking about. He's talking about government employees getting to keep their jobs without penalty while not honoring the law, refusing to do a part of their job. No one in the United States has to issue a license for or perform a wedding they don't approve of. But there are some jobs that aren't compatible with that refusal. And Huckabee's invocation of the civil rights movement and conscientious objectors to promote the idea that people should be able to bring their bigotry into the function of the government without facing any kind of personal sacrifice or challenge is just another sign of how whiny and entitled so many Christian conservatives are today.
Also, dude. Arguing that people opposing equality are like Martin Luther King? Seriously?