Mike Huckabee appeared on the Family Research Council’s “Washington Watch” program this week to share his outrage that Walmart, among other businesses, came out against a right-to-discriminate bill that was passed by the state legislature in his home state of Arkansas. Huckabee told FRC president Tony Perkins, the host of the program, that the gay community has turned the controversies surrounding “religious freedom” legislation in Arkansas and Indiana into a “phony crisis.”

“It’s been manufactured by the left, just as was the war on women,” Huckabee said. “There was no war on women. The left has gotten very good on creating a crisis, something to divide the country, something to create this sense in which ‘we’ve got to go after these conservatives because they are trying to trample over our rights.’”

He added that the LGBT rights movement is like something out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984”: “It is a classic example of — really a page out of ‘1984,’ when what things mean are the opposite of what they really are. And that’s what I’m seeing here is that in the name of tolerance, there’s intolerance. In the name of diversity, there’s uniformity. In the name of acceptance, there’s true discrimination.”

Perkins contended that gay people who are denied service by a business should simply try to find another shop that will serve them rather than filing a lawsuit against discriminatory business owners. “Where will it stop?” he asked Huckabee.

“It won’t stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the Gospel,” Huckabee replied, “and I’m talking now about the unabridged, unapologetic Gospel that is really God’s truth.”

Later in the program, Huckabee insisted that unlike the gay community, conservative Christians would never boycott a business like Walmart. Perkins, however, interjected that he does, in fact, plan to boycott Walmart since the company is “taking a stand against religious freedom.”

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Huckabee then backtracked slightly, claiming that “it may come to the place where there will be a day in which Christians have had enough of this — I don’t think they have yet, I still see too many of them folding — but there may come a day in which they realize how close they are to losing all of their freedoms. And maybe there will be a day in which every one of the believers of this nation, people of faith and even some people who aren’t necessarily Christian but they’re people of conscience and they’re people of fairness, and they’ll just say that we will have a national boycott of the following businesses, and let’s just see if they really feel that they are taking the right position.”