Earlier this month, Mike Huckabee joined American Family Radio host Dan Celia at Grove Avenue Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, where he was asked about the “twisted ideology” allegedly destroying the U.S. military.
Huckabee, who has previously pledged to restore Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and defended a ban on trans service members, denounced Obama administration efforts to permit open service by LGBT troops.
“The morale in our military has never been lower,” Huckabee said. “Among our service men and women, there is a great sense of discouragement because they did not sign up to be a part of a special club to try out social experiments to appease those who push for political correctness.”
Instead of focusing on keeping the country safe, Huckabee said, “there has been such a focus to making sure that we have same-sex relationships that were celebrated in the military, that we push for a complete inclusion and even the taxpayer-funded payment of transgender surgery for service persons who believe that they are another gender. I cannot imagine why we would spend a dime changing the gender of someone in the military when we have vets coming back without arms and legs that are waiting months in a VA facility, that is inexcusable.”
He then claimed that military service members shouldn’t “cook meals, build schools, make nice shelters and do the work of the Peace Corps,” since the “purpose of the United States military is to kill people and break things and to create the most awesome, feared force on the face of the earth.” Only then, he said, will America’s enemies “respect us.”
Huckabee also addressed the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision, which he once again labeled an “illegal and unconstitutional” ruling that should be ignored.
He blamed President Obama for the outcome of the ruling by “congratulating them on their sexual identity and sexual preference” and having “celebrated same-sex marriage” when he called openly gay athletes Jason Collins and Michael Sam after they came out of the closet.
After criticizing Obama’s support for marriage equality along with the major corporations that “put rainbows up on their website celebrating same-sex marriage,” Huckabee said “we would not be where we are in that decision had a president not given it the cultural kind of acceptance and the authenticity and the authenticating that he did.”
