Huckabee the Dominionist

During his appearance on Meet the Press yesterday, Mike Huckabee not only made clear his retrofuck bigotry against the LGBTQ community, but also took a moment to demolish any doubts that he is, in fact, a Dominionist.

Republican Mike Huckabee said Sunday he would not back down from a 1998 statement in which he said he hoped Baptists would "answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ."

The ordained Baptist minister made that remark at a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention nearly a decade ago. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Huckabee said that "it was a speech made to a Christian gathering, and certainly that would be appropriate to be said to a gathering of Southern Baptists."

Huckabee cannot seriously be arguing that assuring any audience "taking back the nation" for their particular interest is defensible. Or "certainly appropriate." By his logic, it's thusly acceptable to say in front of an audience of white supremacists that one hopes they will "answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for the white man." I highly doubt he would defend such an exhortation, yet he's willing to engage in the same type of exclusionary rhetoric that suggests unique ownership of the nation, without regard for the message communicated to its millions of non-Christian citizens.

America doesn't belong to any one group. I honestly cannot think of a more profound disqualification for the American presidency than the failure to acknowledge that liberty and justice for all aren't mere words, but a basic principle of this nation the president swears to defend.

Huckabee talks a good game:

"The key issue of real faith is that it never can be forced on someone,” Huckabee said [on MTP]. “And never would I want to use the government institutions to impose mine or anybody else's faith or to restrict."

But just two weeks ago, Huckabee was in Houston for a fundraiser (costing up to $4,600 a couple) held at the home of Steven Hotze, "a leader in the highly conservative Christian Reconstruction movement," and hosted by a committee including Rick Scarborough, founder of Vision America, which organized the War on Christians Conference, and the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration, which runs the website StopActivistJudges.org. Scarborough, who calls himself a "Christocrat," is also the author of Liberalism Kills Kids and is fondly remembered for arguing against the compulsory inoculation of girls against the cancer-causing HPV, because mandatory vaccinations "signify that God's moral law regarding sex outside of marriage can be transgressed without consequence."

Huckabee claims that he is not a Dominionist, but he hangs out with some of the most prominent Dominionists in America. Huckabee says that he would never use government institutions to impose a particular faith, but his positions on cultural issues like reproductive rights, same-sex unions, stem cell research, etc. all curiously fall in line with a very specific Christian conservative faith and can be defended only with religious doctrine specific to that faith. Either Huckabee's lying to his evangelical base, or he's lying to everyone else. One way or another, he's a liar. And that's not very becoming of a Baptist minister. Especially not one who wants to reclaim the nation for Christ.

Perhaps he knows as little about his religion as he appears to know about his country.