GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee promised in a recent Google hangout with conservative activists that he will never call gay people’s marriages “marriage” because “marriage does have a definition and that’s not it.”
Huckabee fielded a question from Douglas Wilson, a controversial Reconstructionist pastor who once proposed exiling gay people and coauthored with a Southern separatist a pamphlet defending slavery, about what he would do to prevent “the same-sex mirage” from victimizing Christians, prompting the former Arkansas governor to declare that he would not recognize same-sex couples as married.
“The agenda here is not simply to have the freedom for same-sex relationships called marriage, I refuse to say that that’s marriage because marriage does have a definition and that’s not it,” Huckabee said. “The assault is on something deeper than just the institution of marriage.”
Predicting that gay marriage will put Christian-led hospitals and universities “out of business,” Huckabee said he would direct the Justice Department to defend people who are supposedly being oppressed by gay marriage. He specifically pointed to the Oregon bakers who violated a state nondiscrimination law — not marriage law — by denying service to a gay couple.
“I’d love for the Department of Justice to be sent in to defend the Klein’s against an outrageous attack on their religious liberty,” he said.
In the conversation, which W. Scott Lamb of Reformation Press posted online two weeks ago, Huckabee also repeated his call for elected officials to defy the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling and his warning that gay marriage will lead to anti-Christian persecution.
