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Monday, December
24, 2007 |
The news you need now |
Before they were
candidates
'Bullying' gays
wasn't priority for Huckabee
Governor opposed
rights, but often quietly
By MELANIE ASMAR,
concordmonitor.com from the Web, December 24, 2007
On Valentine's Day 2005, Mike
Huckabee and his wife, Janet, were married all over again. Then governor
of Arkansas, Huckabee hoped the super-public ceremony -- which took place in an
arena full of more than 6,000 people -- would spark a wave of covenant
marriages, legal contracts available in only three states that commit couples to
counseling and a two-year waiting period before divorce.
At one point during the ceremony, a whistle sounded and about two dozen
protesters stood up, according to The New York Times. They unfurled a
banner: "Queer equality now."
Huckabee ignored them, the Times reported, and went on with the ceremony.
Arkansans who watched Huckabee during his 10½-year tenure said that gesture was
emblematic of his approach to gay-rights issues: He paid them little mind
unless pressed. But his stances have attracted attention recently after a
report that Huckabee advocated isolating AIDS patients in 1992.
Observers said Huckabee's positions on gay rights fell in line with those of
most social conservatives: He supported a constitutional amendment to
define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and he opposed allowing gays
to become foster parents. But, they said, Huckabee didn't make those
issues priorities, focusing instead on issues such as education and health care.
"He may well be a mean-spirited, gay-bashing Christian evangelical in his heart
of hearts," said Janine Parry, who teaches Arkansas politics at the University
of Arkansas, "but it's not how he governed. He didn't use the bully pulpit
to bully gays and lesbians. He could have, but he didn't."
As a U.S. Senate candidate in 1992, Huckabee wrote in an Associated Press
questionnaire that homosexuality was an "aberrant, unnatural and sinful
lifestyle" that posed "a dangerous public health risk." Huckabee has since
said he won't run from the statement but would express it differently today.
A comment he made in a meeting with Monitor editors in August 2006 has also
drawn scrutiny. As Huckabee has risen from an asterisk to leading the
polls in Iowa, the news media -- and his opponents -- have seized on his
suggestion then that he supported state-level civil unions.
"I would tend to leave (the question of civil unions) to the state, as long as
they wanted to not call it a marriage," Huckabee said in 2006. "Now if
they'd call it a marriage, then I'd have a problem with it."
When he returned to the Monitor this month, he was asked to clarify his
position.
"I've never supported civil unions, and I don't," Huckabee said. "I don't
know, honestly, how I said what I said (in 2006) other than, 'Hey, that's
something New Hampshire has to deal with.' "
Huckabee said civil unions are a "precursor to same-sex marriage." In some
ways, he said, they're the same because to dissolve one, a couple would
essentially divorce. Huckabee added he's not familiar with the specifics
of New Hampshire's law, because he's never "been interested in a civil union
myself."
That last comment is characteristic of the way Huckabee spoke about gay-rights
issues during his time as governor, liberal observers said. Rita Sklar,
the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, said
Huckabee's rhetoric was often "extremely unpleasant or sarcastic."
"He is hardly ever outright nasty," Sklar said. "But he is suggestively
nasty."
In 1997, six months after Huckabee became governor, the Arkansas legislature
passed a law banning same-sex marriage. Huckabee supported it and put
forth an amendment that said Arkansas should prohibit sodomy to protect the
traditional family structure.
Press accounts suggest that Huckabee didn't make any big speeches in support of
the law. A poll taken weeks before the law passed showed 79 percent of
Arkansans supported it.
Jay Barth, an Arkansas political science professor who wrote a book about
Arkansas politics, said Huckabee was "a very smart politician who gained an
understanding on where Arkansans were."
In 2004, when a conservative group successfully lobbied to get a state
constitutional amendment banning gay marriage on the ballot, Huckabee took a
similar approach. The Arkansas Marriage Amendment Committee announced its
intentions at a news conference in the governor's reception room at the capitol.
Huckabee, however, wasn't there. He was on a nine-day economic development
trip to Asia.
Huckabee lent his support to the group and its cause through a spokesman, press
accounts said.
"This isn't a ban on 'gay marriage' since, for those of us who believe in the
biblical and historical definition, there's no such thing as 'gay marriage,' "
said Huckabee, a former Baptist minister. "We can disagree yet respect a
homosexual relationship between two consenting adults. But when government
is asked to approve the relationship, the people have a right to maintain the
traditional definition of marriage."
Barth said Huckabee let other Republicans lead on gay-rights issues. The
amendment passed with 75 percent of the vote.
"When the issues became front and center, he toned (it) down in his public
statements," Barth said. But, he added, "we have little insight into what
went on in churches where he preached. ... We don't know what Mike Huckabee the
preacher was saying during those years, but what Mike Huckabee the politician
was saying were conservative things, but not in a hard-edged type of way."
Foster parenting
Beginning in 1998, Huckabee dealt with a different gay-rights issue, one that
ended in a lawsuit: whether gay men and lesbians could be foster parents.
That year, a child welfare board that Huckabee helped create barred homosexuals
and unmarried heterosexuals from serving as foster parents.
Again, Huckabee first commented through a spokesman. "It is not in the
best interest of children for them to be placed in an environment that the
Legislature has specifically and purposely removed from legal sanction and
recognition," he said. The spokesman also said Huckabee opposed removing a
child from a heterosexual home on a "mere accusation" and placing him or her
with gay foster parents.
In 1999, a gay couple, a lesbian and a heterosexual man who couldn't be a foster
parent because he lived with his gay son sued the Arkansas Department of Health
and Human Services and the child welfare board. In 2006, the Arkansas
Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The high court upheld a lower court
decision that the ban on gay foster parents sought to improperly regulate
"public morality."
But in 2004, after the lower court ruling, the legislature had changed the law
to prohibit unmarried cohabitating couples from being foster parents. When
asked about the Supreme Court decision by a group of Iowa Republicans a month
later, Huckabee told them the state's rule barring unmarried couples from
serving as foster parents "probably takes care of it," according to the
Associated Press.
Huckabee added that lawmakers would move swiftly to ban gays and lesbians from
becoming foster parents. The Arkansas legislature has thus far been
unsuccessful in doing so. Nebraska and Utah are the only two states to ban
gay foster parents, according to a 2007 report by The Urban Institute, a
nonpartisan economic and social research policy group.
In a recent Monitor interview, Huckabee said he thought the people pushing to
allow gays and lesbians to be foster parents were acting out of their own
personal interests, not those of children.
"I felt, and I still feel, any decision ought to be in the best interest of the
child and it ought not to be about making a point or taking a position for
social change," Huckabee said. "I felt that many of the people who were
pushing it were not pushing it so much because their first concern was for the
children. Their concern was for their rights to be able to ... be foster
parents.
'Cultural conflicts'
Huckabee's 1992 AIDS comments were not his last on the subject. He spoke
about AIDS while in office in Arkansas and wrote about the disease in his second
book, where he cited AIDS and homosexuality as two of the "cultural conflicts"
fragmenting the country in the late 1990s.
In 1992, it had been seven years since the federal Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention had said AIDS couldn't be spread by casual contact. On a
candidate questionnaire, Huckabee said it was puzzling why the "carriers of a
genuine plague" had not been isolated. He also complained that too much
federal money was being spent on AIDS research and suggested celebrities such as
Madonna fund the research themselves.
"It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS," he wrote.
"This deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil
rights issue instead of (a) true health crisis."
The Associated Press reported Huckabee's 15-year-old comments earlier this
month. In response, Huckabee said it was not certain in 1992 that AIDS
couldn't be spread through casual contact. As proof, he cited the case of
a woman who said in 1991 that she'd been infected with the disease by her
dentist.
Huckabee also denied ever calling for a quarantine, saying he never meant to
"lock people up."
"I'm not going to recant or retract from the statements that I did make,
because, again, the point was not saying we ought to lock people up who have
HIV/AIDS," Huckabee said on Fox News Sunday.
"I had simply made the point, and I still believe this today, that in the late
'80s and early '90s, when we didn't know as much as we do now about AIDS, we
were acting more out of political correctness than we were about the normal
public health protocols," he added.
In 1994, a year after Huckabee became lieutenant governor, he asked the Arkansas
attorney general to review an AIDS-prevention course taught in a small high
school in the Ozark Mountains.
Huckabee complained the 10th-grade course, called "Preventing AIDS," portrayed
homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle. An assistant attorney general
ruled the course did not violate Arkansas law.
Four years later, in 1998, Huckabee co-wrote a book called Kids Who Kill:
Confronting Our Culture of Violence. It was published three months after
the fatal school shooting in Jonesboro, Ark. In it, he said the shootings
were the result of a decaying society beset by "abortion, environmentalism,
AIDS, pornography, drug use and homosexual activism." He also lumped
homosexuality with pedophilia, sadomasochism and necrophilia as "publicly
endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations."
By contrast, in 2006, Huckabee used a somewhat innocuous joke to illustrate his
support of traditional marriage to a roomful of socially conservative voters in
Washington: "Until Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback
Mountain saying he's changed the rules, let's keep it like it is," he said.
His comment was met with wild applause.
Melanie Asmar can be reached at 224-5301, ext. 321, or by
e-mail at masmar@cmonitor.com.
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