i would preface this with something, but i'm afraid i might lose what little composure i have left regarding the blight to ALL thinking people that is Mike Huckabee...

http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2007/12/huckabee-homosexuality-environmentalism-book.html

Mike Huckabee: Playing Both Sides of the Pulpit

Washington Dispatch: The candidate says he wants to unite the country. But in a 1998 book, Huckabee was a fierce culture warrior, equating environmentalism with pornography, homosexuality with necrophilia, and nonbelievers with evildoers.

By David Corn

December 17, 2007

In the days before this debate, Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, was hit with questions regarding his past remarks and positions on religion (in 1998 he said, "I hope we...take this nation back for Christ"), on AIDS (in 1992 he proposed that people with the disease be quarantined), and on the role of women in society (in 1998 he endorsed an ad affirming the Baptist teaching that a "wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband"). And Huckabee was obviously trying to come across as a friendly and reasonable fundamentalist who eschewed the politics of division. But not too long ago, Huckabee was quite willing to be divisive. In a 1998 book decrying American culture, Huckabee was no seeker of common ground. He drew stark lines, equating environmentalists with pornographers and homosexuality with pedophilia and necrophilia. He also declared that people who do not believe in God tend to be immoral and to engage in "destructive behavior." He drew a rather harsh picture of an American society starkly split between people of faith and those of a secular bent, with the latter being a direct and immediate threat to the nation.

The book, Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence, was hardly a call to come together. Huckabee wrote it with George Grant in response to the March 24, 1998, school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The book was published in early June of that year, its cover featuring a blurry photograph of a young boy pointing a gun at the reader.

In Kids Who Kill, Huckabee argued that school shootings were the product of a society in decline, a decline marked (and caused) by abortion, pornography, media violence, out-of-wedlock sex, divorce, drug use, and, of course, homosexuality. Huckabee and his coauthor bemoaned the "demoralization of America," observing, "Despite all our prosperity, pomp, and power, the vaunted American experiment in liberty seems to be disintegrating before our very eyes." Huckabee, who was governor at the time and a well-known social conservative, blasted away at those whom he held responsible for America's ills, and he took a rather tough stand against government social programs and their advocates. In lamenting the "cultural conflicts" besetting the country, he wrote,

Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities.

Why was he lumping environmentalism with activities he considered sinful? He did not explain further. A few pages later, Huckabee complained,

It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations—from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia.

Huckabee did not say what public endorsement of pedophilia or necrophilia he had in mind. But he did seem to be equating homosexuality with both.

Throughout the book, Huckabee warned of going soft on immorality. He slammed those Christians who accept a "misguided version of 'tolerance'" and do not voice outrage at cultural deterioration. Mocking such Christians, he huffed, "We don't want to offend anyone." He denounced what he termed "radical ideological secularism," and he declared, "in the name of civil liberties, cultural diversity, and political correctness, a radical agenda of willy-nilly moral corruption and ethical degeneration has pressed forward." Without identifying any secularists by name, he wailed,

The legal commitment of ideological secularism to any and all of the fanatically twisted fringes of American culture—pornographers, gay activists, abortionists, and other professional liberationists—is a pathetically self-defeating crusade that has confused liberty with license.

This is not the rhetoric of a fellow looking to heal divisions within American society. And Huckabee approvingly quoted a "pastor-patriot" of the early 1800s who said, "Every considerate friend of civil liberty, in order to be consistent with himself, must be the friend of the Bible." That's a rather fundamentalist definition of a civil libertarian.

In Kids Who Kill, Huckabee addressed the decline of manners and civil discourse in American life. He favorably cited the trenchant analysis of the modern media culture that Neil Postman, a liberal critic, presented in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Huckabee argued that the entertainment industry "is conditioning kids to kill." But he also groused about unnamed "modern government-sponsored social engineers," claiming that "virtually every dollar poured into" government social programs "has only made matters worse." With such a remark, he was planting himself firmly in the government-is-the-enemy camp.

Elsewhere in the book, Huckabee denounced no-fault divorce and claimed that "equality in the workplace has ironically worked against women in innumerable ways." Looking for an expert on this matter, he pointed to a 19th-century author named Peyton Moore, who once noted, "Whenever we attempt to muddy the distinctions—the God-given distinctions—between men and women, it is always the women who ultimately lose." He didn't say that women should stay at home. But he heaped scorn on those who advocate workplace equality for women.

So what to do about a culture that breeds kid killers? Faith is more important than policy or politics, Huckabee argued. The "Judeo-Christian religion," he wrote, states "that faith counteracts the destructive effects of sinful actions and activities." That's what you would expect a religious-minded person to believe. But Huckabee went further and declared that nonbelievers tend to be evildoers:

Men who have rejected God and do not walk in faith are more often than not immoral, impure, and improvident (Gal. 5:19-21). They are prone to extreme and destructive behavior, indulging in perverse vices and dissipating sensuality (1 Cor. 6:9-10). And they—along with their families and loved ones—are thus driven over the brink of destruction (Prov. 23:21).

Huckabee is certainly entitled to his religious beliefs and his own view of human nature. He is free to think that nonbelievers cannot be trusted. But should Huckabee be allowed to play both sides of the pulpit? Kids Who Kill presented a black-and-white perspective: environmentalists, homosexuals, civil libertarians, supporters of social programs, advocates of workplace equality, and nonbelievers are on the dark side and allied with the forces of decline; people who believe in the Bible are the decent Americans. In 1998, Huckabee was claiming a religion-oriented cultural war was under way in the United States and he was happy to be a warrior for his side. Now he says he wants to bring together a "polarized" society. His 1998 book—full of unforgiving rhetoric—indicates that Huckabee is more comfortable creating divides than bridging them.

David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief.

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I do wish religion wasn't such an issue in this political race in the US

But it is, and it is coloring everything...and, IMHO, not in a good way

the US - politicians and people - would do well to remember Jefferson's "wall of separation"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/13/opinion/13cohen.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

Secular Europe’s Merits

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland

The cathedral here, on which work began in the 12th century, was once the largest in Scotland, until a mob of reformers bent on eradicating lavish manifestations of “Popery” ransacked the place in 1559, leaving gulls to swoop through the surviving facade.

Europe’s cathedrals are indeed “so inspired, so grand, so empty,” as Mitt Romney, a Mormon, put it last week in charting his vision of a faith-based presidency. Some do not survive at all. The Continent has paid a heavy price in blood for religious fervor and decided some time ago, as a French king put it, that “Paris is well worth a Mass.”

Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, was dismissive of European societies “too busy or too ‘enlightened’ to venture inside and kneel in prayer.” He thereby pointed to what has become the principal transatlantic cultural divide.

Europeans still take the Enlightenment seriously enough not to put it inside quote marks. They have long found an inspiring reflection of it in the first 16 words of the American Bill of Rights of 1791: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Thomas Jefferson saw those words as “building a wall of separation between church and state.” So, much later, did John F. Kennedy, who in a speech predating Romney’s by 47 years, declared: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”

The absolute has proved porous. The U.S. culture wars have produced what David Campbell of Notre Dame University called: “the injection of religion into politics in a very overt way.”

Much too overt for Europeans, whose alarm at George W. Bush’s presidency has been fed by his allusions to divine guidance — “the hand of a just and faithful God” in shaping events, or his trust in “the ways of Providence.”

Such beliefs seem to remove decision-making from the realm of the rational at the very moment when the West’s enemy acts in the name of fanatical theocracy. At worst, they produce references to a “crusade” against those jihadist enemies. God-given knowledge is scarcely amenable to oversight.

But Bush is no transient phenomenon; he is the expression of a new American religiosity. Romney’s speech and the rapid emergence of the anti-Darwin Baptist minister Mike Huckabee as a rival suggest how estranged the American zeitgeist is from the European.

At a time when growing numbers of Americans identify themselves as born-again evangelicals, and creationism is no joke, Romney’s essentially pitted the faithful against the faithless while attempting to merge Mormonism in mainstream Christianity. Where Kennedy said he believed in a “president whose religious views are his own private affair,” Romney pledged not to “separate us from our religious heritage.”

“Religiosity now seems at least as important for public office as leadership qualities,” said Karl Kaiser, a German political scientist. “The entrance condition for the American presidential race is being religious. If you’re not, you have no chance, which troubles Europeans.”

Of course, the religious heritage of which Romney spoke is real. The Puritans’ vision of America as “a city upon a hill” was based on a covenant with God. As the Bill of Rights was formulated, George Washington alluded in his Thanksgiving Proclamation to “that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.”

Religion informed America’s birth. But its distancing from politics was decisive to the republic’s success. Indeed, the devastating European experience of religious war influenced the founders’ thinking. That is why I find Romney’s speech and the society it reflects far more troubling than Europe’s vacant cathedrals.

Romney allows no place in the United States for atheists. He opines that, “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Yet secular Sweden is free while religious Iran is not. Buddhism, among other great Oriental religions, is forgotten.

He shows a Wikipedia-level appreciation of other religions, admiring “the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims” and “the ancient traditions of the Jews.” These vapid nostrums suggest his innermost conviction of America’s true faith. A devout Christian vision emerges of a U.S. society that is in fact increasingly diverse.

Romney rejects the “religion of secularism,” of which Europe tends to be proud. But he should consider that Washington is well worth a Mass. The fires of the Reformation that reduced St. Andrews Cathedral to ruin are fires of faith that endure in different, but no less explosive, forms. Jefferson’s “wall of separation” must be restored if those who would destroy the West’s Enlightenment values are to be defeated.

Huckabee is the right candidate for you if you want to banish other people's rights over their own bodies, as well as other people's rights to have a legal life together...

personally, i'll like to pass on a presidency based on "the holy word of God" according to Mike Huckabee - i don't think the U.S. could survive another one of THOSE

"Family Values" - a phrase that makes me cringe

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/why-hate-huckabee/?8ty&emc=ty

The Conscience of a Liberal
Paul Krugman