More About Mike Huckabee

The more I read or hear about Mike Huckabee, the more I like him. I know he is a longshot, but we need to get the word out there that there are good, true conservative candidates out there.

The following is from unionleader.com:

Huckabee: Marriages face enough challenges without ‘experiements’

By PHILIP ELLIOTT
Associated Press Writer

NASHUA, N.H. (AP) — Republican Mike Huckabee said Friday that marriage shouldn’t be treated as an “experiment,” responding to questions about whether he thinks Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter should have the right to wed.

The former Arkansas governor, making the first trip to New Hampshire since announcing he would seek the GOP presidential nod, said heterosexual marriages face enough challenges without adding new configurations into the mix.

“Taking on a new definition doesn’t make sense right now,” Huckabee said in an interview with The Associated Press after meeting with business leaders.

Mary Cheney and her longtime partner announced last year they were having a baby together.

In 2004, the year Arkansas approved a constitutional amendment to ban “gay marriage,” Huckabee said the ban was needed to quiet activists looking to rewrite the nation’s social code.

“There are some very strong, loud activists who want to completely redefine marriage,” Huckabee said on July 6, 2004. “Many of us (amendment supporters) feel that it has become necessary to reaffirm the historical definition of marriage. It cannot be redefined to be something that culture wants it to be.”

But Huckabee also said it was OK to say a person’s sexual preference was nobody’s business, “even though it’s not consistent with the Biblical norm of male and female.”

“It’s a different thing … to rewrite the social code,” the governor said at the time.

Huckabee wasn’t on the ballot that year, but the anti-gay marriage amendment helped Huckabee’s other ballot-box task: helping President Bush win re-election.

On Friday, Huckabee declined to comment on Mary Cheney’s decision to have a child with her longtime partner.

“I wouldn’t get near specific cases,” Huckabee said.

But when pressed, he said the historic definition has worked for so long for a reason.

“People have a right to decide how they live their lives. But they have to respect not changing the definition of marriage,” said Huckabee, who served as a pastor in Baptist churches before becoming governor in 1996.

Last month, he wrote in his most-recent book, “From Hope to Higher Ground:”

“Whether or not our culture should accommodate persons of the same gender who wish to share hospital visitation rights, insurance benefits, and so forth is an entirely different discussion, but to call anything and everything a ‘marriage’ is unacceptable because marriage means something specific – a permanent relationship between a man and woman for life.”

And when the Arkansas Supreme Court in 2006 rejected the gay foster parents ban that had been put in by a state board, Huckabee said through a spokeswoman: “I’m very disappointed that the court seems more interested in what’s good for gay couples than what’s good for children needing foster care.”

Huckabee, speaking earlier in the day at Daniel Webster College, warned audiences that the country is at war with a perversion of Islam and that any bending of U.S. resolve will let the jihadists destroy America.

“This is an enemy that really basks in the perversion of piety and the face of a faith to create a real sense of the ultimate contrast between light and between darkness, between life and between death,” Huckabee said.

He said anything less than a resounding victory in Iraq and elsewhere would mean the end of U.S. culture.

“This is not like most wars and battles which are fought over property or prosperity or personalities or even politics,” he said. “At the heart of this is religion. But a perversion of religion. Islamic fascism is real and the jihadists that have declared a war against us must be understood in the theological context in which this war is being waged.”