HUCKABEE: Many issues are at stake, but some issues are not negotiable: The right to life from conception to natural death. Marriage should be reinforced, not redefined. It is an egregious violation of our cherished principle of religious liberty for the government to force the Church to buy the kind of insurance that leads to the taking of innocent human life. Your vote will affect the future and be recorded in eternity. Will you vote the values that will stand the test of fire? This is Mike Huckabee asking you to join me November 6th and vote based on values that will stand the test of fire.

Mike Huckabee continues the GOP pre-election push to make sure everyone knows Republican "leaders" are just horrible, miserable human beings. He's cut a new ad claiming in that usual, not-terribly-subtle Republican pseudopreacher way, that if you vote the wrong way on Nov. 6 you're probably going to go to hell. Ah, that famous right to life that never quite extends to wars, the death penalty, or anything else. That "redefinition" of marriage that can never quite fathom how often marriage has been "redefined" over the years and how what Mike Huckabee thinks of as "marriage" is not the be-all, end-all of what everyone else has to think about the subject. The religious liberty that now sees "having my employees get insurance coverage that upsets my own pre-Victorian sensibilities on what birth control means, and I think maybe it means abortion because I am a lying, anti-scientific imbecile" as the defining moral battle of our times. So you either do what Mike Huckabee says or it's off to the hellfires for you.

I would take these moral scolds a wee bit more seriously—just a bit, mind you—if I had, say, ever heard of someone being evicted from their religion over their unwavering public support for torture. Or if public endorsement of the death penalty was an excommunication-worthy offense, because hey, life is life. But it's not, and it never will be, because modern religious conservatism is about sex, sex, and sex. I have never heard Mike Huckabee or any of these other moral scolds get a tenth as worked up over anything—human rights, torture, mass bombings, assassinations, industrialized slavery, deportations, worker exploitation, child poverty, other poverty, fouled water, insufficient food, or ostentatious fake preachers taking the Lord's name in vain to beg for a few more million dollars on the teevee—as they do over the notion that somebody, somewhere, is having sex in an unapproved fashion.

Test of fire, indeed.

