Huck Us All

Mike Huckabee comes across as a nice guy. On a personal level, I bet I'd like him. Sense of humor. Not seeming to take himself too awfully seriously. Master of the faux open-mindedness of a zealot on a mission, he appears to realize he needs to bide his time, wear a little sheep. He's a really good example of why religion and politics don't mix. Not to the benefit of society. This society, anyway. Well, the kind of society that includes thoughtful people. Treats people fairly. Uses brains.

So I guess it's an open question.

Anyway, here's what he said recently.

“You don’t go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal,” he said of same-sex marriage. “That would be like saying, well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let’s go ahead and accommodate those who want to use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, so we should accommodate them.”

As tired clichéd rhetoric goes, I guess you gotta admire him for holding off on the horse thing. He had more to say, though:

In what may come as a surprise for some, Huckabee agreed that an atheist could be fit to serve as president. “I’d rather have an honest atheist than a dishonest religious person,” he said.

“It’s better to have a person who says, ‘Look, I just don’t believe, and that’s where my honest position happens to be,’” he said. “I’m frankly more OK with that than a person who says, ‘Oh, I am very much a Christian. I very much love God.’ And then they live as if they are atheists, as if they have no moral groundings at all. That’s more troubling.”

“I think it’s nice if a person believes in God,” Huckabee said. “I’d hate to think somebody was making decisions who thought that he couldn’t be higher than himself.” (Emphasis mine, mine, mine.)

"Huckabee agreed that an atheist could be fit to serve as president." Really? Is that what he said? What he said was that atheists have no moral grounding. And he said something incomprehensible about being higher than oneself. Guess he's referring to George Bush listening while God told him to spend thousands of lives and trillions of dollars (unfunded) to depose a guy who was no threat. Good one, God. Totally got him.

This is exactly the self-important and self-deluding b.s. of the holier-than-thou. It's the smugly satisfied, thoroughly debunkable belief that good behavior based on expectation of reward or fear of punishment is somehow morally superior to the same acts done only because it does right by one's fellow men. And women. The opposite, of course, is true. And what gives Slim Mike the right, based on a self-contradictory book written by a bunch of guys twenty centuries ago, to deny the most basic of freedoms to people with whose sexual orientation he's uncomfortable? To claim, against all evidence, that their orientation is a matter of choice?

God save us from such believers. They'll be the death of us all. Homosexuals first, of course. Non-Christians second, to be sure. But, eventually, every last one of us, including themselves.