Mike Huckabee is going ballistic about LGBTQ+ people – again
Former Arkansas Governor, and sometimes presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee has never been a friend of the LGBTQ+ community. Through all his years in the public eye, he has missed no opportunity to condemn LGBTQ people as a severe threat to the United States.
Related: Huckabee quits country music board amid backlash over his anti-gay rights record.
He is a Baptist minister in addition to being a politician and ultra-conservative political pundit. He is now a commentator for a weekly news and talk show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network; he was previously at Fox News.
He is at it again. Last week, in a The Christian Post interview, he said that the “biggest threat to biblical principles today is the failure to apply a biblical standard of maleness and femaleness.”
And, surprise, he blames the Christian Church.
He told the Post, “We are creating this illusion that there is no gender, there is no identity, and I'm blaming the Christian Church.”
Among other things, he blames the move to “no-fault divorce” for creating a mindset that marriage “wasn’t really that important.”
And then he pivoted to the LGBTQ+ community and same-sex marriage in particular. “That’s [no-fault divorce] when we first started losing that sense of sacredness of what marriage meant,” he argued. “So I'm not really that surprised that same sex-marriage has become in vogue because the Christian Church were the ones who essentially abdicated a strict responsibility about what biblical marriage should look like.”
He also cites his continuing belief that having “a loving mother and father in a home where a child sees both genders play out their norms because that’s the modeling of behavior that would be ideal for a child to grow up in.” It’s a position that is widely disputed by many studies that say a loving family – opposite sex or same-sex – is the key to child development.
Again focusing on Christians, he said, “People are afraid that if they are really biblical, it will alienate people and I think that's nonsense. Yes, it will alienate some people who are more interested in preserving the lifestyle they have chosen than a lifestyle that will be practical and will work. But it will also be a lifesaver for the people who are really looking for genuine truth.”
As noted, this isn’t the first time Huckabee has spoken out against the LGBTQ+ community. When he was running as a contender for the Republican nomination in 2015, he railed about a range of topics, according to HRC:
- He compared marriage equality to incest, polygamy and alcohol use
- He believes same-sex love is “icky”.
- He has pushed back on LGBTQ+ non-discrimination legislation at every opportunity
- He has opposed laws banning so-called conversion therapy against minors
Huckabee once signed a disparaging pledge branding same-sex parents as “destructive,” and a “threat to security,” according to Towleroad.com. And he “ promised a three-point plan to sign ‘religious liberty’ executive orders to protect ‘traditional; marriage and prosecute as hate crimes any attacks on the right of religious people to discriminate against LGBT people should he become president.”
Only 63, it looks like we will have Mike Huckabee challenging LGBTQ+ rights for a long time to come.
Copyright The Gayly – April 9, 2019 @ 3:15 p.m. CDT.