Mike Huckabee is claiming those terrible comments he made to a college newspaper about gay marriage — that it’s a “behavioral pattern,” like drug using, that shouldn’t be tolerated — were taken out of context. Except the student reporter recorded the whole thing. Oops!

In an interview published April 9, Huckabee spoke about gay marriage in this way: “You don’t go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal. 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 who 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.”

He spoke about gays adopting in this way: “I think this is not about trying to create statements for people who want to change the basic fundamental definitions of family. And always we should act in the best interest of the children, not in the seeming interest of the adults. Children are not puppies. This is not a time to see if we can experiment and find out, how does this work?”

But now Michael Tracey, editor of the College Of New Jersey’s newspaper The Perspective, has suddenly become Huckabee’s Enemy No. 1, with claims of the paper taking Huckabee’s remarks out of context.

In a statement, the former governor and potential GOP presidential candidate says:

The young college student hopefully will find a career other than journalism. I would ask that he release the unedited tape of our conversation. I believe that what people do as individuals in their private lives is their business, but I do not believe we should change the traditional definition of marriage. Not only did he attempt to sensationalize my well known and hardly unusual views of same-sex marriage, he also inaccurately reported my views on Michael Steele as GOP chairman – I offered my support and didn’t “Rip into Steele” as his article asserted. I had a candid and frank conversation with the group about health care, education, the economy and national security while the young journalism student, instead, chose to focus on the issue of same-sex marriage and grossly distort my views.

The newspaper responded in kind:

It is telling that nowhere in his statement did Huckabee suggest he was misquoted in the article, and rightfully so; we have the audio and transcripts to prove that everything reported is accurate. Huckabee’s problem seems to lie more in the focus of the article, which is centered partially on LGBT issues. We feel that same-sex marriage, laws prohibiting gays and lesbians from adopting children, and ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell‘ are legitimate policy concerns about which to question national political figures. Gov. Huckabee may disagree.

And released the audio, which is actually more damning than the original published remarks. Among Huckabee’s comments:

In a perfect world, in the ideal world, people would recognize that having a child is heavy duty responsibility and you engage into a relationship with somebody sexually as a permanent expression of your commitment to that person. You don’t use another person a sexual toy and toss them away, leaving them with the burdens of a child. That to me is what’s so recklessly irresponsible and ridiculous immature. When people use another person as their sexual object of pleasure without any regards to the ultimate consequences of it. That’s not mature sexuality, that’s immature, selfish lifestyle. … The ideal world is a man and a woman. You don’t go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal.

You’ll notice Huckabee refuses to say gays and lesbians fall outside of this ideal world, claiming Tracey is putting those words in his mouth. But by grouping these so-called alternative lifestyles into the groups of other terrible behaviors — i.e. drug users — he is tacitly categorizing them together. That isn’t the same thing as taking his words out of context; it is, in fact, putting them in context.

Ahem.