Mike Huckabee’s job appears to consist of spoon-feeding lies to marks who gleefully consume it, no matter how outrageous it is. When this is your position, the “truth” becomes a job hazard and Huckabee ran headlong into it when he took on California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom over the weekend.
“Get your facts right.”
Over the weekend, Huckabee took on Gavin Newsom for his support of same-sex marriage, accusing Newsom of breaking the law when he issued marriage certificates while Newsom was mayor of San Francisco.
Huckabee took it one step further and compared it to the disgraced Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis, adding there wasn’t any outrage when Newsom supposedly “broke the law” then.
Newsom, however, was paying attention and slammed Huckabee:
What’s the key difference between Davis and Newsom? Newsom was the white man who went into the South to help break the Jim Crow laws. Davis is the person enforcing those laws. Furthermore, Newsom stopped when the court ordered him to, unlike a certain clerk from Kentucky.
The distinction was lost on Huckabee, though, who’ll do whatever it takes, no matter how big the lie, to twist Davis into a Munchausen Martyr. During a Sunday appearance on ABC’s This Week, Huckabee said that Newsom “ignored the law when it was the law to have traditional marriage.”
He then asked a rhetorical question, answering it shortly after that:
“Did he ever get put in jail? He most certainly did not.”
It may surprise some to learn that Huckabee is adopting an actual, ethical position with that statement: it’s called deontology, and it’s a type of ethical framework that values the law and obedience to it.
Thrasymachus, one of the many people to debate Socrates and lose in The Republic, illustrates why deontology is morally incompatible with a functional definition of “justice.” Huckabee, for all his talk about Christianity and Christ, is taking a position closer to a pagan sophist who essentially argued “might makes right” than anything Christ ever said.
Of course, as you can probably guess, Huckabee is only nominally deontological; he applies the laws to himself only when it would benefit him.
During the height of Prop 8’s reign, Newsom issued some 4,000 marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Prop 8 would eventually be struck down as unconstitutional at the California supreme court in 2010, and again, in 2015, at the Supreme Court of the United States.
Huckabee, meanwhile, is adamantly supportive of Kim Davis, and will host a rally in her honor Tuesday in front of the jail where she’s being held.
Feature image via Flickr
Is Gavin even old enough to have “gone into the South to help break the Jim Crow laws”? He was my mayor, and I’m not knocking him. I’m just skeptical of that claim.
Metaphor.
Hyperbole
The author was making a metaphor about who was on which side of the issue using the civil rights movement as a comparison.
Are we at all shocked that Mike Hucksterbee told a lie?
A lying republican. And this is news?
If only these folks put as much energy into feeding the hungry, assisting the feeble, housing the homeless and promoting good will as they put into trying to insert the tenets of THEIR faith into secular law, how much could be accomplished?
Every one of the people who is frothing at the mouth in defense of this woman’s refusal to fulfill the sworn duties of her office could have been helping a senior weed their garden, teaching a young person how to can preserves,change their oil, knit, bake, throw a curveball, build a table, sew (whatever skill they might have that needs passing down), volunteering at a school, a hospital, a soup kitchen, comforting a hospice patient, bringing a meal to a shut in, giving someone who lacks transportation a lift to the market or the doctor’s office…. It’s not enough to be good, you must be good for something