I threw this snark over at Newscoma about Huckleberry.  But you know how sometimes you’ll have a cup o’ java and do some thinking and suddenly something needs to be said?  Well, that, my friends, is exactly where I’m at right now, so here comes my soap box and my pontification of the day.  Yes, my question over there was just one of my (mostly lame) attempts to bring funny, but as with all funny there’s a little truth hiding in there if you look hard enough.  So here’s my truth, Mike Huckabee just scares the crap out of me.  Pure and simple.  And not just for one or two reasons, oh no.  The reasons he scares me wouldn’t all fit in a big dumptruck, even if it was driven by Chuck Norris himself. 

Over there, I posed the question “Which would you rather have as your President?  Mike Huckabee or a Zombie”  Okay, so that’s way into the ridiculous but I still pick the Zombie and the reasons are still the same.  Think about it.  On the one hand, if you choose the Zombie, you get a bloodthirsty, brain-eating, parasite who is intent on destroying you and everything you hold dear – but the fact is that you know that up front.  With Huck, you get a JC Penney suit, telling you he’s your friend, telling you he thinks just like you do, and telling you that he’s in a position to make everything better.  So you trust him, and you put him into a position of power, and suddenly he’s legislating his religion into all our lives and he’s destroying you or people you care about and he’s taking away everything you hold dear.  Yeah, that’s how it will happen, if you let him.  But, the key difference is that you’ve let him do it, by trusting in him and giving him your tacit acceptance.  So, tell me, is there a difference?

Let me ask all religious conservatives this?  If the message in your faith is that strong, that life-altering, that big of a difference in your life, then why should it have to be made into law in order for people to see the superiority of it?  Shouldn’t you be able to sell me on it through your life and the examples that you live daily?  So, now I have to ask why your faith alone should be the driving factor behind laws that govern people who do not believe the way you do?  If it’s that much better everybody would be converting to it and living it.  Therefore you wouldn’t need to make it the law, because people would be choosing it as their lifestyle anyway.  Let’s go a step further with this and compare legislated religion to forced drug or alcohol rehab.  Say your spouse is an addict and you find out about their problem.  Do you force them into treatment at the first knowledge of their problem, whether they want to go or not?  No, you don’t, unless you want them to start using again just as soon as they are released.  Yeah, that’s how it works, really.  You first have to allow the addict the time and space to finally understand their addiction, accept it as an addiction, and ask for help.  And you have to accept that some addicts will never get to that point and you will lose those.  So, if you take that analogy and apply it to religion then if you are paying attention you’ll see the problem fairly quickly.  That’s why it has confounded the hell out of me when several people I know and respect have told me that Huck’s idea to change our constitution to match the Bible is just the best thing they’ve ever heard?  “The way it should have been in the beginning” is my favorite quote. 

Again I say, if you think your product is so much better then you need to get out there and sell it.  You certainly don’t need laws that require your product to be in my home, whether I want it there or not.  My household is of two distinct religious beliefs, neither of them is better or worse, they are just different.  For me to say to the Bob that his faith is nothing but folderol and he has to drop it and come over to my way of thinking is more than a little arrogant, don’t you think?  The reality is that all of us have our own unique relationship with whatever superior being we believe in (or don’t, for some of us, and that’s okay too).  We are not a monolithic body with one voice, one belief, and one way of life – we are America and we have choices.  Mike Huckabee has constantly talked about taking away those choices, under the heading of loving God and feeling that God should have dominion over us.  Guess what Mike?  God already has dominion over my house, and the constitution didn’t have to be changed in order for him to get that.  He did it on his own, by speaking to our hearts.  He lives here, whether you believe it or not, and we talk to him all the time, and we hear him too.  We made the choice to invite him in, and because he wasn’t forced in, he’ll stay here.   And, that, Mike, is how you put God into your house.  Not at the end of a gun or a legislating pen, not by changing laws and forcing people via crime and punishment to think the way you want.  How do you know what God wants?  Are you so arrogant as to believe that God is only talking to you?  Yes, yes you are, and that is the part that scares the hell out of me, and that’s the main reason that Mike Huckabee is clearly not qualified to be the leader of our nation.  You can disagree with me, because that’s your choice, but our constitution was written with very specific attention paid to the necessity of separation of church and state.  It needs to stay that way.  Mike wants to eliminate that wall, because only Mike thinks that he knows best what God wants.  But, then again, there’s a homeless man downtown who also says he talks to God, so maybe we need to listen to him because under Mike’s rules he’s just as qualified? 

I hope that Mike goes home and stays there, for good.  He can wear his suit, eat his Sunday Fried Chicken, and sing the Doxology all day long in Arkansas… just keep him and his taliban-like beliefs off the national stage.  For God’s sake, just don’t put him in my White House, not now and not ever.  Why?  Well, because God said so.  Ask him.  He’ll tell you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Politics.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.