Jon Stewart politely and respectfully beat the shit out of Mike Huckabee over Huckabee's opposition to gay marriage.
If you buy into Huckabee's argument that the reason for only letting people get married is because they can breed, then you would not be against sterility testing prior to marriage. The marriages that the newspaper editors love to run stories about, the "childhood sweethearts get married after sixty years" would be illegal. Had a vasectomy, post-menopausal- no marriage for you!
But no. Huckabee and all the rest of the "we ought to base all our laws on the Bible" crowd close their eyes to that reality and adopt the legal fiction of "the fertile octogenarian." If marriage is all about raising kids, then let's make that part of the law; no kids after X number of years, your marriage is voided.
You might also note that when Stewart raised the points that slavery was permitted in the Bible and that polygamous marriage was common, Huckabee danced away from discussing those topics as though he was covered in snake oil. Child marriage was also common a long time ago, but it is not now.
Huckabee is flat-out wrong when he asserts that "marriage is a privilege." It most assuredly is not; marriage is regarded as a fundamental right. Look up Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. 374, a 1978, a case where Wisconsin sought to deny people who owed child support the automatic right to marry... "the right to marry is of fundamental importance to all citizens." Even prison inmates have a right to get married, Turner v. Safley 482 U.S. 78, in 1987 (a unanimous opinion).
What gripes me most of all is Huckabee's notion that if people vote to deny rights to others, that is OK with him. There was no shortage of states which still outlawed interracial marriage when Loving v. Virginia was decided by the Supreme Court 41 years ago; President-elect Obama's parents' marriage was illegal in a substantial number of states when he was born. Voters in this country do not get to choose which group of citizens are allowed rights and which are not. The voters in Arizona, for instance, cannot disenfranchise Hispanics. Voters cannot forbid an ethnic group from living in their community.
Huckabee seeks to use the law to enshrine discrimination based on his notion of who is worthy of being married and who is not. That we even need to discuss the wrongness of Huckabee's position irks me no end.
Running On Draft Mode
2 hours ago
4 comments:
I don't dislike Huckabee as a person. I think his heart's in the right place.
But he's wrong about this just as people were wrong to disallow interracial marriage way back when.
I think Obama's an example of why it's okay for that.
Huckabee strikes me as being far more dangerous than either Bush or the other far-Rightists from the oggedy-boogedy branch of the GOP. Huckabee has said before that he wants to change the Constitution so that the laws of this land are based on (his interpretation of) the Bible.
I think he is dangerous because comes across as a good-hearted and reasonable person for all of the religion-based intolerance he spouts.
As much as the necessity of this discussion angers me, I cling to the hope that open discussion makes the constant "homily" contentions of the Huckabee types look as bigoted, thoughtlessly misguided, and stupid as they really are to people who are behaving like mentally religious sheep.
I'm with Comrade E.B. Misfit on this. Huckabee is dangerous.
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