Did Huckabee really mean it when he claimed that madmen shoot up schools because his god isn’t being preached from the chalkboard? Short answer: Yes, though he’d rather not be held accountable for it. This is what fundies mean when they call themselves “Bible-believing Christians”. The Bible has lots of accounts of God smiting people who don’t worship or obey him by killing their children, and Huckabee and other Bible literalists believe that’s just how their god rolls. The problem is that Huckabee is too much of a coward to just say it. So he dumped a bunch of words trying to “complicate” his argument Saturday:

ADVERTISEMENT

But if you listen carefully to what he’s saying, he’s still making the same argument: That “morality” is strict adherence to a fundamentalist-defined Biblical law, and his god is punishing us for not doing that by killing children. There’s no other way to understand the claim that we’ve “given up” having morality. He believes there is only one morality, and that’s strict adherence to his definition of Biblical law. We have plenty of moral laws in this country that have nothing to do with his narrow version of morality. For instance, many of us think it’s morally wrong to exploit the deaths of schoolchildren to push your faith that you chose largely because it justifies your misogyny, which is what Huckabee did.

And make no mistake: Huckabee is specifically thinking of women’s rights when he’s thinking of the “immorality” that brings his god’s vengeance in the form of an angry young man shooting up a school. This isn’t speculation; he specifically singled out the sale of contraception (which he calls “abortion”, but we now he’s talking about contraception because abortion pills are not sold in pharmacies) as the sin that offends God so much he has to send murderers to kill children:

I guess Huckabee thinks that if women try to exert control over when they have children, God will take it back by having a few children killed.