From Mike Huckabee's official website:
My faith is my life - it defines me. My faith doesn't influence my decisions, it drives them....I don't separate my faith from my personal and professional lives.
Also from Huckabee's website:
I support and have always supported passage of a federal constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman. As President, I will fight for passage of this amendment. My personal belief is that marriage is between one man and one woman, for life.
Let's consider these statements and the logical conclusions that follow.
Conclusion 1: If Huckabee's faith drives his decisions, and if he doesn't separate his faith from his personal life, then his personal belief that marriage is between one man and one woman, for life, must derive from his faith.
(Conclusion 1 may seem self-evident, but feel free to double-check my logic, as Conclusion 1 bears on Conclusions 2 and 3.)
Conclusion 2: If Huckabee's faith drives his decisions in the professional realm, and if it is his faith that leads him to believe that "marriage is between one man and one woman, for life," (see Conclusion 1), then his stated support of a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman does, indeed, follow as a logical conclusion.
(How's my logic holding up?)
Conclusion 3: If Huckabee's faith drives his decisions in the professional realm, and if his faith leads him to believe that "marriage is between one man and one woman, for life," then, just as he supports a gay marriage ban, he must also support a federal constitutional amendment banning divorce.
(Right?)
Logically, yes, but let's check back in at Huckabee's website: I see that he led Arkansas to allow for "covenant" marriage (a form of marriage that does not permit no-fault divorce), and that many churches in Arkansas will now perform only covenant marriages—but I don't see support of a law or constitutional amendment that bans divorce.
I find myself strangely unsurprised—despite the inexorable logic of Conclusion 3. Whatever else he may or not be, Huckabee is a consummate politician, and he understands that support of a divorce ban would not be the least bit politically expedient. (As a high-profile example, outspoken Huckabee supporter Chuck Norris was divorced from his first wife.)
So Huckabee confines his support for bans to the banning of gay marriage. Gay marriage is an issue that provides a convenient intersection between his faith-driven decisions and a politically expedient position, a position that just so happens to appeal to people's basest sorts of motivations: fear, prejudice, and the desire to exclude others to feel more a part of those included.
At least, try as I might, I can't see any other motivations--I can't see any reasonable motivations whatsoever--for the anti-gay marriage position. And neither, apparently, can Huckabee. On his website, he gives the following rationale for his position on marriage:
The late Cardinal O'Connor decried a domestic partnership law [which offers unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples the same rights and privileges as married couples] as legislating that 'marriage doesn't matter.' I agree with the Cardinal that marriage does matter, I would add that nothing in our society matters more. Our true strength doesn't come from our military or our gross national product, it comes from our families. What's the point of keeping the terrorists at bay in the Middle East if we can't keep decline and decadence at bay here at home? The growing number of children born out of wedlock and the rise in no-fault divorce have been a disaster for our society. They have pushed many women and children into poverty and onto the welfare, food stamp, and Medicaid rolls. These children are more likely to drop out of school and end up in low-paying, dead-end jobs, they are more likely to get involved with drugs and crime, they are more likely to have children out of wedlock or get divorced themselves someday, continuing the unhappy cycle.
In this statement, perhaps Huckabee means to imply that legalizing homosexual marriage would, like the domestic partnership law, legislate that "marriage doesn't matter." Perhaps, when he mentions "decadence" and "decline," he means for the reader to assume he is referring to homosexuality.
But he does not say so outright. In other words, he does not make a single direct argument for his position of wishing to deprive gay couples of what I would consider equal protection under the laws of marriage. Indeed, he uses the word homosexual (or homosexuality) only twice: when defining the "domestic partnership law" (in the paragraph quoted above), and when he says:
While Massachusetts was allowing homosexuals to marry, I got a constitutional amendment passed in Arkansas in 2002 defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
What he does condemn, directly and without equivocation or innuendo, are the "growing number of children born out of wedlock" and the "rise in no-fault divorce," referring to these phenomena as "a disaster for our society" and further describing their contribution to a cycle of poverty.
For me, this begs the question: Does Huckabee truly believe that a Constitutional ban on gay marriage would decrease the number of children born out of wedlock? Does he think banning gay marriage would decrease the no-fault divorce rate?
Perhaps he does think so; the "marriage = 1 man + 1 woman" amendment, perhaps he imagines, would by-golly legislate that "marriage does matter," and people would by-golly get it (Oh! The Constitution says marriage is between one man and one woman! Marriage is important!), and these epiphany-struck people would by-golly quit having babies out of wedlock and quit getting divorced.
Perhaps Huckabee believes all this.
Perhaps.
What I can only imagine he knows, however, are the following: People recognize divorce as a social problem. People recognize children growing up without the benefit of two parents in the home as a social problem. People recognize poverty among women and children as a social problem. Moreover, many people do not like their tax dollars going toward welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. And many people hate, fear, and/or misunderstand homosexuality. Which, taken together, mean that a clever politician can play on people's fears and prejudices by combining a discussion of disparate issues to suggest—however obliquely—that a ban on gay marriage "defends" marriage—and, by golly, such a powerful defense of marriage can only result in fewer divorces, more children growing up in two-parent families (please appreciate the irony), and fewer families on welfare. Social problems solved, hurrah!
Of course, if you're going to go ahead and legislate to whom people may or may not be married, the more direct approach to decreasing the divorce rate would be to ban divorce (see also Conclusion 3 above). Hip-hip-hurrah! Social problem solved and Huckabee's personal moral compass maintained!
Right?
Absolutely right—if you once again follow Huckabee's stated positions to their logical conclusions.
In the end, however, Huckabee's positions do not play out to their logical conclusions (i.e., support for banning both gay marriage and divorce), but only to their politically expedient conclusions (i.e., support for banning gay marriage; support for offering heterosexual couples the option of a form of marriage that discourages divorce).
Rather cynical and hypocritical, don't you think?
And who among us clamors for more cynicism and hypocrisy in government?
Yet Americans, it seems, have a love affair with candidates of faith, candidates who promise to lead our democracy according to the lights of their particular religion--when such a promise is so evidently riddled with the potential for inconsistencies, cynicism, and hypocrisy. Mike Huckabee is, to me, a particularly scary rah-rah-my-religion candidate, and I find the proposed gay marriage ban particularly abhorrent (truly, indefensible). But no candidate, neither Democrat nor Republican, is altogether free of this problem of faith-based candidacy; to a greater or lesser extent, they all are eager—or perhaps they feel compelled—to profess faith, a belief in god; more specifically, Christian faith, belief in a Christian god. The media colludes in the love affair; of thousands of questions submitted for the November 28th CNN-YouTube Republican debate, CNN chose only 34 to ask the candidates, among them, "Do you believe every word of the Holy Bible?"
For shame, CNN, for shame.
To return to Huckabee, and not leave him floundering with his own particular brand of faith-based hypocrisy, I would suggest that he consider one or more of the following action items: a) withdraw his support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage; b) include a ban of divorce in his proposed amendment; and/or c) recognize and acknowledge that his particular faith-based values are not moral absolutes, that he should not, and, indeed, does not treat them as moral absolutes within the context of his "professional life" as a politician in a democracy, not a theocracy.
Likewise, the American people need to recognize that profession of faith is not necessarily a useful litmus test for the office of President—that a presidential candidate who appears to suggest some connection between the "decadence" of homosexuality and a "growing number of children born out of wedlock" is not demonstrating some special aptitude for leadership, but only a gross misunderstanding of reproductive biology.