U.S. News posted excerpts today from an early copy of Mike Huckabee’s new book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,” where the former Arkansas governor and likely presidential candidate tries to make the case for banning same-sex marriage.
Huckabee, who also spends time in the book analyzing Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s marriage and comparing the Club for Growth, one of his fiercest critics on the right, to suicide bombers, claims that the government must continue to prohibit same-sex unions because of bisexuals who, according to Huckabee, desire to have two spouses – one male and one female. “Shouldn’t a bisexual be able to have both a male and female spouse?” Huckabee asks. “Wouldn’t restricting that person access to both genders be denying the bisexual his or her marriage ‘equality?’”
Unsurprisingly, Huckabee isn’t the first anti-LGBT pundit to display his complete misunderstanding of bisexuality to defend their opposition to marriage equality.
In another excerpt, which David Catanese of U.S. News calls a “considerable concession,” Huckabee writes that marriage equality bans should remain in place because we don’t know what the future holds. “When advocates of same-sex marriage say, ‘What’s the harm?’ the honest reply is that at this point, we simply don’t have enough reliable accumulated data to be able to say,” he said.
Huckabee, of course, has repeatedly claimed in front of right-wing audiences that he knows exactly what will happen to society if same-sex marriages become legalized: divine punishment.
“There is no doubt in my mind that this country would not exist had it not been for the providential hand of God,” Huckabee said during his speech at the National Organization for Marriage’s June march against marriage equality in Washington D.C. [reordered] “And I’m also convinced that if we reject his hand of blessing, we will feel his hand of judgment.”
Huckabee similarly told his European tour group following a visit to Nazi concentration camps that “the soul of America is in real trouble” as a result of the growing movement to “tinker” with “the foundation of our society and culture: marriage.”
He warned that Americans are following in the footsteps of the Nazis by losing sight of moral principles: “when we tinker with [marriage’s] definition and decide that it can mean anything we wish for it to mean, and that rather than to take a biblical perspective we will take a very human one and we will base marriage on human experience and desire as opposed to biblical standard, then I fear that we will pay the consequences for having upended the very foundation, which is the essence of how a civilization survives.”
It’s almost as if Huckabee has one message for his fiercely conservative base and a more nuanced message for a wider audience.
