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The Huckabee Surge
Why Religious Right Activists Like Mike
Mike Huckabee’s rise from second-tier candidate to frontrunner in Iowa started after he was the top-ranking candidate to appear at the “Values Voter Debate” organized by a group of lesser-known Religious Right leaders on September 17. The event was a near parody of itself, from the opening choir singing “Why Should God Bless America?” to the parade of far-right activists seeking pledges from the candidates. Huckabee, who was right at home, assured participants that he is one of them, professing that “the language of Zion” is a “native tongue” not a “second language” to him, and making a populist critique of the more established GOP candidates.
Huckabee’s performance confirmed for the Religious Right audience that he shares their views on a range of issues. On marriage, he said he would lead an effort to pass a constitutional amendment affirming marriage as “one man, one woman, for life.” On abortion, he needled the missing candidates and said “on this issue, our culture rises or falls.” He backed the Iraq war, calling it a “theological war” against people “whose religious fanaticism will not be satisfied until every last one of us is dead, until our culture, our society, is completely obliterated from the face of the earth.”
In the yes or no segment of the debate, Huckabee pledged himself to a long far-right wish-list, including:
support for ousted Alabama Chief Judge Roy Moore’s court-stripping bill to keep federal courts from meddling with public officials who use their office to promote religion;
vetoes of hate crimes legislation, ENDA (anti-discrimination law), and the fairness doctrine;
stripping schools of federal funding for exposing children to “homosexual propaganda”; repealing IRS restrictions on churches endorsing candidates;
bringing back Bush’s social security privatization plan;
imposing a ban on federal funding for any U.S. group that performs or advocates for abortion;
boosting federal abstinence spending to match contraceptive funding.
Huckabee was the runaway winner of the straw poll taken among the organizers’ hand-picked attendees. More than that, he was declared an answer to prayer by organizer Janet Folger (author of “The Criminalization of Christianity”), who said Huckabee had been revealed by God to be the “David among Jesse’s son’s.” Folger has only ramped up her rhetoric since then, insisting that God’s hand is on Huckabee and that he will be the next president of the United States. Folger was recently named to co-chair Huckabee’s Faith and Family Values Coalition.
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Hard Right Beneath the "Nice Guy" Schtick
Part of Huckabee’s rise has relied on him (and the media) playing up a cheerful sense of humor and constrasting himself to “angry” candidates, and staking out some different positions on some issues. But he has a long record of rhetoric and actions that reveal an ideologue’s agenda and a zealot’s intolerance for differing opinions.
In 1992, many years after science had definitively ruled out the possibility of HIV/AIDS being passed through casual contact, Huckabee called for a quarantine of people infected with the virus:
"It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population," he said. "This deadly disease, for which there is no cure, is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.
"If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague."
[Huckabee: Cure Health Cost Hikes in Marketplace; Isolate AIDS Victims 13 October 1992, The Associated Press Political Service]
As governor, he violated federal law and defied an order from a federal judge and barred the use of Medicaid funds to pay for an abortion for a 15-year-old mentally retarded girl impregnated by her stepfather.
At the 2000 Christian Coalition Road to Victory conference, Huckabee criticized the Clinton Administration by saying that they will "suck your brains out" when you're born and "suck your pocketbook" when you die.
In a speech to high school students at the Arkansas’ Governor’s School, he offered his prescription for solving problems with welfare: “When you quit giving a check to a guy to sit on his butt, he’ll get off his butt.” He went on to say that those people who weren’t able to take care for themselves should be institutionalized rather than put into society and given welfare.
Today Huckabee’s more moderate stand on the environment, at least as compared to some right-wing activists, is held up as an example of his appeal to a broad range of voters. But a few years ago, his statements were straight out of the Religious Right’s talking points. In a speech to the Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation in 1998, he accused environmentalists of being anti-God. “God made us, and God made the Earth… He gave us the privilege to use it and enjoy the resources, but never to worship it. We’re to worship Him, not the thing He made. To me, environmentalists are those who worship the things that He made rather than He who made them.”
In an earlier speech he ridiculed, “wacko environmentalists, who get out of their concrete towers one weekend a month and go look at a tree, believe they know more about the care of the land than farmers. They want to tell us what deodorant we can use and what kind of gas to put in our car.”
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