I’ll start by apologizing to my fellowNOLA blogger Jimmy Huck for borrowing his blog name for this post but, hey, it fits Mike Huckabee’s latest hissy fit:
Though some conservatives are shifting course and backing gay marriage – likeBill O’Reilly and
Sen. Rob Portman, for example – Mike Huckabee remains adamant that if
Republicans change course they will lose the support of evangelicals.Republicans
may begin to support gay marriage in full force, Huckabee said, “And if
they do, they’re going to lose a large part of their base because
evangelicals will take a walk.”“And it’s not because there’s an
anti-homosexual mood, and nobody’s homophobic that I know of, but many
of us, and I consider myself included, base our standards not on the
latest Washington Post poll, but on an objective standard, not a
subjective standard,” he toldNewsmax.Huckabee
continued: “I have great sympathy and extraordinary admiration for Sen.
Portman. I consider him a friend and I value his work in the Senate and
think he’s a great person. The mistake is that we sometimes base our
public policy decisions on how we feel, how we think, maybe even some
personal experiences, and we don’t regard a lot of these issues from the
standpoint of an objective standard.”
Lemme get this straight: Huckabee’s position on marriage equality is objective? Ain’t nothing objective about feeling threatened by same sex couples tying the knot. It is the *most* emotional and irrational argument imaginable. He makes it sound as if Rob Portman has a low testosterone count unlike Scalia’s late hero Strom Thurmond…
If I were a high GOP panjandrum (thank, god, I am not) I’d tell the Huckster to walk because it’s an empty threat. Third parties simply do not work in our political system. The history books are littered with the corpses of those who thought a third party was viable: from TR to Henry Wallace to George Wallace to Ross Perot. Hmm, Henry and George sound like they got gay married or something…
Like it or not, you have to work within the two party system for your issues and positions to be adopted. That’s why marriage equality is now the de facto position of the Democratic party. Hell, North Carolina’s Kay Hagan came out for it and she’s up for re-election in a largely red state. (I wonder if she was dazed by the Tar Heels loss to bleeding Kansas?) I would be shocked if my own Democratic Senator, Mary Landrieu, endorsed marriage equality before 2014. She doesn’t have all those college kids to rally behind her like Hagan, but I’m impressed with the latter. Here’s a rousing fuck yeah, Senator Hagan.
Back to Huck’s upchuck. The GOP is too afraid of its bible banger wing to change dramatically. The so-called libertarian wing is only for smaller guvmint when it comes to economic issues, they’re all in for intrusive guvmint as to social issues. I’ll call them actual libertarians when the Paultards and their ilk oppose trans-vaginal ultrasounds and support guys named Mike marrying one another.
That is all.
The Huck-ster has never impressed me as an intellectual power house. All you have to do is ask him what **Objective** standard he is judging marriage by. His intellectual arguments would readily fall apart.
(I just looked up his bio on wiki – graduated undergrad from Ouachita Baptist, went to SW Baptist Theological but dropped out after one year – Southern Baptists don’t require a theological degree to be pastor / ordained. His time at SW would also be about the time the S Bapts were in meltdown over the teaching in their seminaries. Perhaps more important was that he spent time working for James Robinson and some other similar groups).
There may not be enough popcorn in the world to get us through this. I’d love to see the dumbass evangelicals try to start a third party. I even have a name for it: The American Taliban. Nice ring, don’t you think?