Mike Huckabee Rips Natalie Portman For “Glamorizing” Single Motherhood

Mike Huckabee channels Dan Quayle when he decides to comment on the pregnancy of Oscar winner Natalie Portman.

Doug Mataconis · · 62 comments

Mike Huckabee just isn’t having a good week.

First, in what he says was a mis-statement, he says that the President was raised in Kenya by a father he barely knew and a grandfather who died before he was born. At the same time, he was correcting that mistake, he said that President Obama had a foreign worldview. Then, he made some insinuation about the President attending a madrassa instead of joining the Boy Scouts like a “real American.” Now, he’s gone after the woman who just won the Academy Award for Best Actress:

Mike Huckabee laced into Oscar winner Natalie Portman for her “out-of-wedlock” pregnancy, saying the expecting star is helping to “glamorize” single motherhood. Huckabee made the comments on conservative commentator Michael Medved’s radio show this week, after Portman accepted her golden trophy and in her speech thanked her fiance, Benjamin Millepied, for giving her “my most important role of my life.” Medved led the way on the question, saying the “most wonderful gift” Millepied could have given the diminutive Black Swan star “would be a wedding ring! And it just seems to me that sending that kind of message is problematic.” Huckabee said he hadn’t seen the Oscars telecast, but added, “What’s troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having these children, and they’re doing just fine,’ Media Matters reported on its website “But there aren’t really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie,” he added. “And I think it gives a distorted image that yes, not everybody hires nannies, and caretakers, and nurses. Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out of children wedlock. He added, “You know, right now, 75 percent of black kids in this country are born out of wedlock. 61 percent of Hispanic kids — across the board, 41 percent of all live births in America are out of wedlock births. And the cost of that is simply staggering.”

Audio and transcript:

MEDVED: Governor, I know you probably are out on book tour right now, you probably didn’t have a chance to watch the Academy Awards last night? HUCKABEE: I’m very happy to say that I missed it because usually it’s about the most boring waste of several hours that I’ve ever experienced. MEDVED: Well this was a – this was a low audience. However, there was – there was one moment where a very brilliant and admirable actress named Natalie Portman won Best Actress, and she won for a movie which I loathed called Black Swan. But in any event, she got up, she was very visibly pregnant, and it’s really it’s a problem because she’s about seven months pregnant, it’s her first pregnancy, and she and the baby’s father aren’t married, and before two billion people, Natalie Portman says, ‘Oh I want to thank my love and he’s given me the most wonderful gift.’ He didn’t give her the most wonderful gift, which would be a wedding ring! And it just seems to me that sending that kind of message is problematic. HUCKABEE: You know Michael, one of the things that’s troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having these children, and they’re doing just fine.’ But there aren’t really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie. And I think it gives a distorted image that yes, not everybody hires nannies, and caretakers, and nurses. Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out of children wedlock. You know, right now, 75 percent of black kids in this country are born out of wedlock. 61 percent of Hispanic kids — across the board, 41 percent of all live births in America are out of wedlock births. And the cost of that is simply staggering. MEDVED: It’s tremendously staggering.

Now, of course, Huckabee is right that out of wedlock births do often lead to social problems – although I would bet that he would be opposed to the kind of aggressive contraceptive education programs that actually might help reduce that problem in poor communities — but he’s making the same dumb mistake here that Dan Quayle did twenty years ago. Back then, of course, the Vice-President famously called out a television program for “glamorizing” unwed pregnancy:

The Vice President dared to argue last week in a San Francisco speech that the Los Angeles riots were caused in part by a “poverty of values” that included the acceptance of unwed motherhood, as celebrated in popular culture by the CBS comedy series Murphy Brown. The title character, a divorced news anchorwoman, got pregnant and chose to have the baby, a boy, who was delivered on last Monday’s episode, watched by 38 million Americans. “It doesn’t help matters,” Quayle complained, when Brown, “a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman” is portrayed as “mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘life-style choice.’ “

Of course, rather than stirring a debate, Quayle ended up just making himself more of a target for ridicule, especially since he was picking on a fictional character. In Huckabee’s case, I suspect the reaction will be about the same, with the added benefit that he’s, you know, attacking an actual mother-t0-be. It was absurd to argue then that Murphy Brown was responsible for society’s ills, and it’s absurd now to suggest that Natalie Portman is responsible for today’s.

This does bring up one thought, though, with all the odd things that Huckabee has been saying this week, one wonders if he’s decided that he’s not running for President so he can say whatever he wants.

Update: As one of the comments below points out, Huckabee’s comments are particularly inane given the fact that Portman will be marrying the father of her child in a few weeks.