In an interview with the Christian Post last week, failed presidential candidate and right-wing pundit Mike Huckabee blamed the existence of transgender people on the Christian church not doing enough to teach a “biblical standard of maleness and femaleness.” The interview is being promoted on Facebook this week by the Christian nationalist American Renewal Project and its California affiliate. Huckabee hosts a weekly show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) and is a Fox News commentator.

“Redefining gender and sexual identity is the ‘greatest threat’ to the moral fiber of America, said former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee,” begins the Christian Post article, “and the fault lies with the Church.” Huckabee explains:

“The biggest threat to biblical principles today is the failure to apply a biblical standard of maleness and femaleness,” Huckabee told The Christian Post during a sit-down interview last week in Anaheim, California. “We are creating this illusion that there is no gender, there is no identity, and I’m blaming the Christian Church.”

Huckabee said that the passage of a no-fault divorce law in California in 1970 started the process of Americans “losing the sense of sacredness of what marriage meant.” Churches “abdicated a strict responsibility about what biblical marriage would look like,” he said, so it’s not surprising that “same-sex marriage has become in vogue.”

“Once you’ve destroyed that, why can’t you have any and everything?” he told the Christian Post. “The gender dysphoria we’re seeing today is largely due to the fact that the Church has failed to present very clearly the words of Jesus and Genesis 5:2: ‘Male and female He created them.’”

Transgender people are the targets of fierce public relations and political campaigns being waged globally under the banner of opposing “gender ideology” and in the U.S. by Religious Right leaders and right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation. The Trump administration has instituted a ban on transgender people in the armed forces; Friday, April 12, is the deadline for the more than 14,000 trans people now serving openly in the military to get an official diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” in order to be allowed to continue to serve.