Legality, Religiousity, Post-Prop 8 Ugliness and the Case Against Huckabee
Yesterday we began to “fisk” Mike Huckabee’s slippery-eel responses to his interview with Hugh Hewitt. With a book in release we are going to be hearing a lot of the Huckster in the next few weeks. I found the New Yorker’s review of his book most fascinating:
In “Do the Right Thing,” he takes a poke at Mitt Romney. “I never felt that he was leveling with the people,” Huckabee said. [emphasis added]
As we saw in the Hewitt interview the anti-Mormon case against Huckabee is not an easy one to make, he has done his job in a cloud of code, plausible deniability, and the Clinton-perfected technique of “if you tell people something other than what happened long enough it becomes what happened.” But, if we take that single quote from his book and examine it through the concluding sentence of Joel Belz ugly, bigoted excuse for a column at World Magazine:
More than anything, I want a president who tells the truth. And I worry deeply when people are overly ready to believe a man whose religious upbringing, of all things, suggests that the truth is a negotiable commodity.
We have a straight line from Mike Huckabee to anti-Mormon rhetoric, and sentiment.
The Republican party cannot tolerate such prejudice against Mormons or anyone else. Mike Huckabee can have his TV show, but he should never, ever have a shot at candidacy for anything with a (R) after his name.
And Still We Have To Defend Mormonism…
At Townhall, K-Lo delineates the problems and presents a conclusion to which I can only add “AMEN!“:
Surely we don’t have to be Mormon to be outraged. I make no statement about their recruitment strategies when I say, watching California, “We’re all Mormons now.” Next time the violent backlash may be in response to a brave Catholic bishop teaching responsibility at the voting booth. Next time it could be an online evangelical dating service hauled into court by a state “civil rights” office for not providing same-sex matchmaking. Oh wait, that already happened in New Jersey.
Now I know why Mormons were so nervous. They were warning the rest of us. Our freedom to believe is at hazard, and it’s time we all had the Mormons’ backs.
Speaking of Prop 8…
Yesterday, Lowell commented on the legal challenges and trends and potential changes in the church/state line. Well, the legal challenges are mounting:
California officials are planning to investigate whether the Mormon church gave an accurate accounting of its role in the campaign that succeeded in getting a same-sex marriage ban approved in the state. The action by the California Fair Political Practices Commission came in response to a complaint filed two weeks ago by a gay rights activist. Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, accuses the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of failing to report the value of the work it did to support Proposition 8.
Somehow I am getting the impression that when we increased the role of government in our lives for the good reasons of dealing with civil rights in the ’60′s we neglected the Law of Unintended Consequences. Funny things deep principles. Generally best to adhere to them, even in the face of the something like segregation – find a different way to overcome it.
Not to mention, Prop 8 has cost another man his job. Now I am a firm believer that people ought to be able to hire and fire who ever they want on all sorts of criteria. If an Evangelical only wants to hire Evangelicals for his business, he may not be real bright, but its his right. But this kind of “politically correct” pressure is something else altogether. It’s oppressive, discriminatory, intolerant, and perhaps even hateful. How can such things come from the side of “tolerance?”
Posted in Proposition 8, Reading List, Religious Bigotry | 1 Comment » | 
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paawa on 26 Nov 2008 at 11:12 am #
It is also interesting to see the lack of backbone and integrity on the part of the CA governor, who has not said a word about all the blatant, over-the-top attacks on the Prop8 supporters in CA, in particular the LDS. By his silence on the matter, he is basically giving the message that it is OK to use tyrannical bullying, vicious slander, blacklisting, vile threats, terrorism, and mobocratic tactics to intimidate your political opponents into submission to your beliefs. What a sorry excuse for a governor. For all his brave, macho persona in his movies, he sure is a wimp when it comes to standing up for what is just and fair in a free society. He should never have been elected, but then again, CA hasn’t had a decent governor since Reagan back in the 60′s and 70′s. It’s never recovered since Jerry Brown was “governor moonbeam”, and now he’s at the forefront of this mess, as the attorney general who was single-handedly responsible for the yes-on-8 people losing several percentage points in the vote due to his re-naming of the legal description of Prop8 to make it look like it was going to “take away rights of gays to marry”, rather than establish “one man and one woman” constituting marriage.