Mike Huckabee, a con man who pretends to run for president in order to get rich without having to work too hard, was spouting some more nonsense about gay people and gay marriage on CNN over the weekend:

“I don’t shut people out of my circle or out of my life because they have a different point of view. I don’t drink alcohol, but gosh, a lot of my friends — maybe most of them — do. I don’t use profanity, but believe me I’ve got a lot of friends who do. Some people really like classical music and ballet and opera. It’s not my cup of tea.” Huckabee said on CNN. “I hope the party doesn’t change its overall view, but the very fact that I talk about relationships I have with friends who are gay, indicate that I’m not a person who shuts everybody out around me who disagrees.”

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Problem is that he doesn’t actually treat being gay like it’s just a difference in taste. That’s actually how liberal straight people see it: That different people are different and that’s okay. But Huckabee does not think that being gay is okay and wants to impose political penalties on gay people to punish them for being different, by allowing discrimination and barring them from marriage. So, the correct comparison is if Huckabee was trying to bar opera lovers and beer drinkers from being able to marry.

The idiocy continued:

“This is not just a political issue. It is a biblical issue. And as a biblical issue, unless I get a new version of the scriptures, it’s really not my place to say, ‘Okay, I’m just going to evolve.’ It’s like asking somebody who’s Jewish to start serving bacon-wrapped-shrimp in their deli. … or asking a Muslim to serve up something that is offensive to him or to have dogs in his backyard,” he said. “We’re so sensitive to make sure we don’t offend certain religions, but then we act like Christians can’t have the convictions that they’ve had for over 2,000 years.”

No, the people who are being forced to live by someone else’s belief are gay people that are not allowed to marry. I realize he, being a lying sleazeball, is eliding discussion about his utterly indefensible support of gay marriage bans and try to make the argument about “individual rights” to discriminate against gay people, because he thinks that’s an easier argument to make. Never mind that it’s utterly two-faced to claim to support “individual rights” while denying gay people the basic right to something as personal as who you marry. But even his argument, which is one that goes back to justifications for Jim Crow that were spun out during the 1960s, is indefensible. He’s falsely comparing items to people. What you sell, sure, you have control over that. But it’s fine to have laws saying that you cannot control who you sell it to. Just as it’s illegal for a diner to refuse to sell to black customers, it should be illegal for a bakery to refuse to sell to gay couples. But sure, if someone wants a vanilla cake and your religion doesn’t permit vanilla, that’s fine to say, “We don’t carry that flavor.” That’s the difference between things and people, a distinction Huckabee is trying to erase.

Roy Edroso flagged a particularly desperate move made by the Witherspoon Institute, who managed to dig up a woman whose mother is a lesbian so that woman can bash the idea of legalizing gay marriage. Her name is Katy Faust and it appears her mother left her father during her childhood to live with another woman, which turned her hostile to gay marriage:

My parents’ divorce has been the most traumatic event in my thirty-eight years of life. While I did love my mother’s partner and friends, I would have traded every one of them to have my mom and my dad loving me under the same roof. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is willing to remove the politically correct lens that we all seem to have over our eyes.

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The flaw with this argument should be super-obvious: When Faust’s parents divorced so her mother could be a lesbian, gay marriage was illegal. If banning gay marriage was enough to force lesbians to live in unhappy marriages with men for the sake of the children, then Faust’s experience should have never happened.

The irony here is that gay marriage may, in fact, actually prevent sad events like Faust’s parents divorcing. That’s because the growing acceptance of homosexuality means that fewer people are going to spend their early years trying to make themselves straight by marrying and having kids with straight people, only to find that they can’t run from their true selves forever and eventually cracking under the strain. If people are coming out at a young age, that dramatically reduces the chance that they’ll marry and have kids and eventually divorce. The best prevention for divorce is preventing bad marriages in the first place, not trying to salvage bad marriages through force.

Also, is there anything more pathetic than a grown adult begrudging parents a bit of happiness, because of their selfish insistence on living some ideal that never really existed in the first place?