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Monday, December 17, 2007

Holy Huck, Batman! This is the Christianist version of the Gospel?

Another Joe Conason reference for the day. In Huckabee and criminals: It's worse than just Wayne DuMond Salon 12/14/07, he discusses the ways that Mike Huckabee relied on a fundamentalist good-old-boy network on parole decisions in many cases, not only in the most notorious one.

David Corn has a real eye-opener of a piece in Mother Jones Online 12/17/07, Mike Huckabee: Playing Both Sides of the Pulpit. This is a good example of how a journalist can come up with some interesting, important stuff based on public sources, in this case Huckabee's own 1998 book, Kids Who Kill. Check out the Huck's Christian[ist] sentiments from that work, such as:

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.

Yes, even though it's the same kind of crap you would find in some White Citizens Council type hate pamphlet, that from the Huck himself. That's the kind of stuff that passes for "compassionate conservatism" in today's Republican Party. Yo!

Corn observes drily, "Huckabee did not say what public endorsement of pedophilia or necrophilia he had in mind. But he did seem to be equating homosexuality with both." Yes, it does seem so.

Then there's this, in case you thought those sinful environmentalists were going to be excepted from prophetic condemnation:

Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities.

And what is Brother Huck's take on those quaint concepts that we know as civil liberties and Constitutional rights? Funny you should ask:

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.

And Huck's kind of worried about all this stuff about equality for dames, too. Corn writes:

Elsewhere in the book, Huckabee denounced no-fault divorce and claimed that "equality in the workplace has ironically worked against women in innumerable ways." Looking for an expert on this matter, he pointed to a 19th-century author named Peyton Moore, who once noted, "Whenever we attempt to muddy the distinctions—the God-given distinctions—between men and women, it is always the women who ultimately lose." He didn't say that women should stay at home. But he heaped scorn on those who advocate workplace equality for women.

And the Huck thinks anyone who ain't a Christian (by the fundi definition, one assumes), then you're likely to be a disgusting libertine with no standards of decency. As Huck put it:

Men who have rejected God and do not walk in faith are more often than not immoral, impure, and improvident (Gal. 5:19-21). They are prone to extreme and destructive behavior, indulging in perverse vices and dissipating sensuality (1 Cor. 6:9-10). And they—along with their families and loved ones—are thus driven over the brink of destruction (Prov. 23:21).

Well, to be fair, he's only talking about "men". It's probably better not even to ask how he applies this notion to women.

Tags: authoritarianism, christian right, christianism, joe conason, mike huckabee

posted at 10:43:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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