Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) responded to an article about his views on dancing when he was younger with references to other politicians’ peccadillos, Buzzfeed reported.

“While other candidates are being outed for their teenage drug use, their teenage alcohol use, their teenage partying hard, doing all sorts of destructive things like painting graffiti on bridges, the scandal with me is that I wrote a column at age 17 telling Christian young people to live a godly life,” Huckabee told Family Research Council president Tony Perkins in a radio interview on Wednesday. “So, I mean, I just had to say, is this really controversial? I’d much rather have to defend this than say, yes, I used to regularly be apart of the choom gang. It’s just bizarre.”

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Huckabee’s remarks came a day after a spokesperson for another prospective GOP presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), revealed that Cruz smoked marijuana as a teenager, but “regretted the experiment.”

As Buzzfeed reported earlier this week, the former Fox News host expressed his antipathy toward dancing in a column he wrote for a Baptist newspaper when he was 17 years old. He wrote, “I strongly recommend that Christian teens stay away from dancing, mainly because some people would just not be able to respect a person who attended dances.”

He followed up on the matter in a later piece, responding to a reader’s question by stating that he did not want other young people to avoid dances because of his own stance, but instead to “look at all the facts, and then on their own decide that dancing is not for the Christian.”

Perkins told Huckabee that he should “feel safe” if the columns were the most incriminating things anyone could point out about him.

“I just find that it’s amazing, but it shows though how contemptuous that the left really is toward believers,” Huckabee said. “They truly do think that we are just laughable for the beliefs we hold.”

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Listen to the interview, as posted by Buzzfeed on Thursday, below.