We have already seen how presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal’s prayer rally has become a Demonic No-Go Zone, with the demons being everybody who disagrees with him. Another presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, fresh off exhibiting the moral relativism of his defense of Ted Nugent’s music while attacking Beynocé’s, is now telling us that it isn’t that he hates gay people, it’s just that he can’t give gay people a break because, well – it’s all out of his hands, as he told televangelist Jim Bakker:
We are just people who believe that there is a standard that was not ours, it was God’s, it was given to us and for us to change it we have to get his permission.
Oh. So he’s just following orders. I shudder when I imagine this kind of nonsense coming out of the White House…I’m sorry, Iran, I had to push the button. It was out of my hands.
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So Huckabee and his fellow bigots are taking one on the chin for God:
The way that we’ve allowed words like tolerance, bigotry — what has happened to us, we allow ourselves to be called homophobic or bigoted, we’re not.
Oh, you’re stand-up guys all right. And women. Don’t forget Sally Kern’s heroic struggle against gay sex in Oklahoma.
All Huckabee is doing, after all, is acting in defense of his “core moral values,” which apparently tell him it’s okay to sing a Nugent ode to pedophilia while excoriating Beyoncé for corrupting children.
Yeah. I think my brain just said, “I quit.”
I’ll try to push on without it. If Huckabee can do it, so can I.
Liberty Counsel’s Matt “one man violently cramming his penis into another man’s lower intestine and calling it ‘love’” Barber, meanwhile, wrote an op-ed yesterday for World Net Daily in which he used “an exercise in logic” as he put it, to slap down marriage equality once and for all:
Declared Jesus: “‘Haven’t you read,’ he replied, ‘that at the beginning the Creator “made them male and female,” and said, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh”? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate'” (Matthew 19:4-6).
Rather conspicuously, and as I’venoted before, Jesus did not say: “At the beginning the Creator made them lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT). For this reason a male, female or shemale will leave his, her or whatchahoozie’s father and mother, father and father or mother and mother and be united to his or her wife – and/or husband – and the two or more will become one flesh. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
What is interesting about Barber’s use of this passage is that here, Jesus is talking about divorce, not marriage. He is not attacking gays, as you might think from Barber’s context. He is simply telling his followers that divorce is not allowed, under any circumstances.
Now here is where his clever use of logic comes in:
“Here’s what marriage is not:
“Anything else.”
Just wow. Slayed it in one. The only problem is that Jesus did not condemn any other kind of marriage. And the Bible is full of plenty of examples, as we have pointed out here on more than one occasion. Polygyny, the marriage of one man to X wives, is enshrined in the Law of Moses (Exodus 21:10; Deuteronomy 21:15-17; Deuteronomy 25:5-10).
What Jesus did not say is that marriage is ONLY the union of 1 man + 1 woman. Jesus did not condemn these other types of marriage. He lived in a society where polygyny was practiced by his fellow Jews, and never uttered one word of condemnation. Yet logic dictates, if Jesus believed it was wrong, he must have condemned it. But he didn’t? What gives?
Huckabee says they are not allowed to pick and choose what to believe, but it seems obvious that what Barber wants to do here is pick and choose his biblical passages. I’ve not seen him push, for example, for the stoning of unruly children, which is absolutely required by the Law.
It’s almost as if the rest of the Bible doesn’t exist for Barber. Only the parts about gays, which are very few. By my estimation, the Religious Right’s Bible is not so much a book as a pamphlet – and not really even that. More of a supermarket flyer.
And this isn’t even getting into all the things Jesus said for the poor and against the rich that Barber ignores on a daily basis. If, as Huckabee claims, their hands are tied, why are they attacking the poor and elevating the rich, in complete defiance of Jesus’ words?
Barber says,
So, to be clear, and when measured against Christ’s unambiguous and biologically affirmed definition of marriage, all “same-sex marriages” are “pagan marriages.” They are “mock marriages” insofar as they mock both real marriage and the Christ who created it.
Moreover, the very thing that defines “gay marriage, the biologically and spiritually disordered act of same-sex sodomy,” likewise mocks God’s design for natural sexual intercourse. The Bible, throughout both the Old and New Testaments, unambiguously condemns as sin rising to the level of “an abomination,” all same-sex sexual conduct, be it, “loving, monogamous and committed,” or otherwise.
Homosexuality is mock sexuality.And “gay marriage” is mock marriage.
It would be swell if Republicans would only devote themselves as much to a war on joblessness as they would their wars on women and gays. It is beyond my own – admittedly limited – ability to understand how legislating against women’s right to control their own reproductive health in any way buttresses the Middle Class or creates jobs, yet the new Congress is rolling out anti-abortion bills as fast as we can track them. Likewise, how does preventing marriage equality strengthen our economy?
I would argue that these are impositions of a narrowly defined and far from universal morality: you’re going to obey our Bible, or else. If these bills aren’t a violation of the First Amendment, I don’t know how to define them. It was their own Ben Carson who argued that Obamacare was unconstitutional because, he claimed, it does not help all Americans. How does banning marriage equality help all Americans? How does banning contraception and abortion help all Americans?
What would help all Americans is creating more jobs, acting in a positive way on behalf of the environment (because there won’t be a lot of marriages taking place under water). Huckabee says he’d like to be president but he doesn’t have any real presidential obsessions. Instead, the father of a dog-torturer wants to lecture us on parenting and on how we can’t ignore God except when we find God’s focus on poor people to be…well, inconvenient when we want to talk about the evils of gay sex.
Barber, meanwhile, has already launched his new campaign, and no, it has nothing to do with saving the environment or boosting the economy or on a very Jesus-focused income inequality. Instead, he is telling us, thanks to marriage equality, incest is The Next Frontier In ‘Reproductive Freedom’. Makes you wonder how the Pope can make it through a day without obsessing on sex.
I’m not seeing anything remotely relevant or meaningful coming out of right wing circles any time soon. I suggest the rest of us let them quietly work out their sexual frustrations and ambiguities while we get on with the important business of not only keeping the country running, but moving it forward in pace with the rest of the world. Eventually, it can be hoped, the right wing will grow up and rejoin us as mature adults.
Don’t expect any miracles by 2016 though. While Ben Carson seems more obsessed with convincing us he’s not crazy than with sex, he’s a black guy in a party that has already made it clear black guys can’t be president. And while Lindsey Graham isn’t obsessing over sex and seems to be flirting with the idea of maybe thinking about the White House, I’m not too certain he can find the courage to crawl out from under his bed to actually run.
No, if we’re going to do this, we’re going to have to do it without the Republican Party, which is unfortunate, because we could use some diversity of thought. It’s just that we aren’t going to find any diversity on that side of the aisle. Or any jobs.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
