





Huckabee Strikes Again Frederick Clarkson print page Wed Dec 26, 2012 at 02:09:22 PM EST Fox News talk show host Mike Huckabee distinguished himself recently by asserting that the reason for the Newtown massacre was that America has removed God from the public schools. Unsurprisingly, other other Religious Right leaders have made similar assertions , although they vary in the reasons from a generalized national apostasy to marriage equality. All this has generated several rounds of unsurprising outrage. And now Huckabee has struck again. This time, Huckabee broadened his argument. In a sermonette on his show, he blamed contraception, which he demagogued as "abortion pills" -- in an apparent reference to the Obama administration's requirement that oral contraception be included in employee insurance packages. Think Progress transcribed Huckabee's latest: Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax-funded abortion pills. We carefully and intentionally stop saying things are sinful and we call them disorders. Sometimes, we even say they're normal. And to get to where we have to abandon bed rock moral truths, then we ask "well, where was God?" And I respond that, as I see it, we've escorted him out of our culture and marched him off the public square and then we express our surprise that a culture without him reflects what it's become. Of course, God and gods, are very much a part of our culture and our public life. That has not changed in any important ways in decades. The way that these things are expressed evolve over time, and not everyone likes change, but people are nevertheless free to express themselves in the "public square" (just try and stop Huckabee!). And in a free society, they might get some feedback when they do. That Huckabee and his allies on the Christian Right want hegemonic conservative Christian control over our society, our institutions and our laws, is no secret even if they do not always speak openly about it. But when the leaders of the Christian Right are speaking more frankly, we hear declarations that they have a God given mandate to seek and achieve that hegemony. And when they don't get their way, they blame the unspeakable on their failure to achieve the unspoken. And, of course, it is someone else's fault.



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