GOP presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said conservatives need to pattern civil disobedience after the nation’s great civil-rights hero in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
Huckabee told ABC on Sunday that he was “moved” by the words of plaintiff Jim Obergefell, who wanted to be listed as the surviving spouse of the man he married in Maryland after they moved to Ohio.
“We’ve always been a nation of law. We’re now a nation of men,” Huckabee argued. “What happened this week is so brilliantly pointed out by Justice Scalia is that this was not done through the legislative process. This was done through a court edict of five unelected lawyers, a part of a committee, who decided that they knew better than the legislators who actually get to make law, that they know better than the people who voted in over 30 states to affirm traditional marriage.”
“This case wasn’t so much about a matter of marriage equality, it was marriage redefinition. And I think people have to say, if you’re going to have a new celebration that we’re not going to discriminate, may I ask, are we going to now discriminate against people of conscience, people of faith who may disagree with this ruling. Are they going to be forced, either out of business, like the florist, the caterers, the photographers, like the CEO of Mozilla, who was run out of his job because of a personal contribution to support a proposition in California that actually won on the ballot.”
When asked if he was going to call for civil disobedience to the ruling, Huckabee replied, “I don’t think a lot of pastors and Christian schools are going to have a choice.”
“They either are going to follow God, their conscience and what they truly believe is what the scripture teaches them, or they will follow civil law. They will go the path of Dr. Martin Luther King, who in his brilliant essay the letters from a Birmingham jail reminded us, based on what St. Augustine said, that an unjust law is no law at all. And I do think that we’re going to see a lot of pastors who will have to make this tough decision. You’re going to see it on the part of Christian business owners. You’ll see it on the part of Christian university presidents, Christian school administrators,” he said.
Huckabee added that he’s “not sure that every governor and every attorney general should just say, well, it’s the law of the land because there’s no enabling legislation.”
“Let me just ask people on the left. If we get a future court that is conservative and that conservative court decides that this was a mistake and we’re going to go back to traditional marriage and we’re also going to say that every unborn people is in fact a person and is – is absolutely guaranteed due process and therefore we would strike down the idea of abortion from conception forward, is the left going to be OK to let the Supreme Court make that decision?” he asked.
“…When the president lit up the White House the other night with rainbow colors, I guess that’s his prerogative. If I become president, I just want to remind people that please don’t complain if I were to put a nativity scene out during Christmas and say, you know, if it’s my house, I get to do with it what I wish despite what other people around the country may feel about it.”
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