Huckabee …

Honestly, I’ve never liked him, whether that’s on TV or on his soapbox, which tend to be the same thing more often than not.    

Some people can mix show biz with politics and do okay. He can’t. Mixing religion and show biz is just dreadful; it may work for a certain crowd hooked on televangelists and their weekly magic shows but misses the mark by a mile for the rest of us.     

I thought his show on Fox was lame. Strapping on his bass and playing with real musicians was embarrassing to watch.  I found his attempts at humorous skits painful. His interviews with his former-sinner-of-the-week-now-miraculously-redeemed guests always seemed like 700-Club reruns on the PTL network. There’s only so much of this anyone can take.   

Thank God that’s over. 

I think at the heart of it, however, I dislike Huckabee the most for using Christianity and the Old Testament of the Bible as weapons against those with whom he disagrees.

This is intellectually and theologically dishonest. It’s picking and choosing from the Old Testament to find the parts that support your position, while ignoring the New Testament entirely.  As a Baptist preacher, Huckabee knows the difference – one features a vengeful God who condones stoning adulterers and murdering nonbelievers; the other features a more compassionate God that sends Jesus to carry a message of compassion and infinite forgiveness.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.  Sound familiar? 

As someone raised in Methodist and later Baptist churches as a child I was taught that religion is intensely personal and to respect the beliefs of others. I was taught that God is all forgiving. I was also taught that humans could never truly understand God’s will, any more than we could really understand the infinite. God’s plan was God’s plan; to assume we could fathom what God intended for all of us, until the end of time, would be the most profound form of arrogance.    

I learned over time not to take the Bible literally. Instead, it was a book of stories to give us clues. The most important takeaways from the Bible and my faith were simple: 

We are never alone in this world.

We’re not perfect nor expected to be; nor should we expect others to be. 

We have free will to do good or evil – the choice is always our own.

We all eventually have to account for the choices we make.

But God, not man, will make that final call.

Maybe that’s why I dislike Huckabee so much. He thinks he’s entitled to make those calls, or at least he wants everyone to believe he should be.  He quotes the Old Testament to imply that homosexuality is an abomination to God and that God always intended marriage to be between a man and a woman, for example.

If I remember correctly, there are lots of abominations to God in the Old Testament, including one by Onan who spilled his "seed" on the ground rather than impregnate his brother's widow, for which God "slew" him. So I'm not sure anyone today wants to use the Old Testament as the complete guide for how to live your life.     

To me he’s a self-righteous blowhard left over from the days of Elmer-Gantry-like tent revivalists. Instead of a tent, he has media clips. He wants to whip up the crowd with a false narrative about secular boogeymen coming to take away their right to worship as they wish as part of a nefarious grand plan to remove God and Christian values from our culture.  

If that were all he’s about, I wouldn’t care. He’d be just another right-wing fundamentalist – a modern day Father Coughlin focused on atheists and sinners instead of Jews and Communists. 

But he wants to be so much more than that: he wants to be President.

God protect us.  Seriously. 

I know a lot of people see him as a jovial fat guy who used to be a Baptist preacher. I don’t.  

I see him as a demagogue milking the public’s fears about a society seemingly spinning out of control morally and ethically.  I put him in the same category as Rick Santorum – constantly carping about what’s wrong with our society but having no clear plan for fixing anything.  Or maybe a Donald Trump without the show-biz presence.    

What brought all this up?  Well yesterday I saw him at a rally for Kim Davis – the Kentucky official who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples – and he was in his glory.

He attacked the Supreme Court for exceeding their authority by making law, which they didn’t.  He claimed the First Amendment gave people like Davis the right to refuse to enforce laws on personal religious grounds, which it doesn’t. 

After saying he’d be willing to go to jail in place of Davis, he also said this:  "I'm tired of watching people being just harassed because they believe something of their faith, and we cannot criminalize the Christian faith or anybody's faith in this country.”

Nobody is suggesting anything of the sort.  But of course, that’s Huckabee.