Thursday, March 28, 2024

Huckabee Calls Out the Left’s Hypocrisy on the Kentucky Clerk

All of a sudden, the media and the Left are very concerned with the “rule of law” and government officials carrying out their duties. But they paid no attention to the rule of law when the Obama administration and numerous spineless state attorneys general refused to defend the real law of the land — their states’ constitutional definitions of marriage. (And in one case, the Virginia attorney general actually joined the plaintiff’s side and attacked the law of the state constitution he swore to uphold!) But the media hailed them for being on “the right side of history.” So where is the media now that Rowan County, Ky., clerk Kim Davis is doing the same thing? Attacking her, of course, because the Left lives by double standards.

At least one presidential candidate is pointing this out — Mike Huckabee. In an interview, he brought an initially hostile Martha MacCallum into agreement with him about the blatant hypocrisy of the Left.

And the excellent points kept coming from Huckabee. He said infamous serial killers like the Boston Strangler at least got bail, but a 57 year old mother and county clerk was denied bail for holding to her Christian beliefs on marriage. He also pointed out that Gitmo terrorists get accommodations like being allowed to stop to pray five times a day and getting halal meals and prayer mats, but American citizen Kim Davis can’t be accommodated for agreeing with at least half the country that marriage is between a man and a woman.

These are Orwellian times we’re living in, and I, for one, am glad Mike Huckabee is making people think:

MARTHA MACCALLUM: I know that you have a rally next Tuesday at 3:00 for Kim Davis. You are very supportive of her. Why?

HUCKABEE: Because this is the criminalization of Christianity. What she did was follow the Kentucky Constitution, voted on by 75% of the people. She has now been criminalized. She’s being held without bail. I want you to think about this. Jeffrey Dahmer got bail. Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler got bail. John Wayne Gacy got bail. Kim Davis, because she followed her convictions, is put in jail and is not given bail. This is an unbelievable moment in American history and I think it may wake people up, because who’s next? Are pastors next? Florists, caterers, who else goes to jail before this is over? And the Supreme Court reached out of thin air and created a redefinition of marriage. There is no authorization from the Congress. The president has never signed a bill that enabled this idea of same sex marriage. And I think it is interesting in Tennessee, there was a judge that dismissed a divorce case — he said, ‘If the court doesn’t think the people of Tennessee aren’t smart enough to know when a marriage starts and what it looks like, then I guess the court doesn’t give us enough sense to know how to end one.’ So he dismissed the divorce case.  The implications of this are extraordinarily far reaching and that is why we will be in Kentucky on Tuesday, 3:00, to rally for Kim Davis and to rally for religious liberty. And most importantly, to rally for there to be consistency in the law.

MACCALLUM: Alright, so what do you say to those who say, well, you know, when that decision came from the Supreme Court, Kim Davis should have said, ‘You know what, I can’t in good conscience keep doing this job. I’m going to find another job, because this isn’t where I should be working, because obviously this is the decision that has been put in place across the country.

HUCKABEE: I went down to Gitmo a few years ago, and I visited. I was amazed at how accommodating we were for all the Muslim detainees we had at Gitmo. There was a stripe in each cell pointing toward Mecca so they would know which way to pray. There were prayer mats provided for them, so they would be able to pray five times a day, and whatever the routine was, they were allowed to do that. They were served halal meals that were consistent with what their religious preferences dictated. All kinds of accommodations, but we can’t accommodate a county clerk in Kentucky because she believes the Biblical mandate that there is a man and a woman?

MACCALLUM: But didn’t they offer to make some accommodations so that other people could be signing those decisions and to allow her to keep her job, and try to find some common ground where she could keep doing it but not violate her conscience?

HUCKABEE: But Martha, it would be over her office with her name. Interestingly, the very form says ‘male’ and the ‘female’. So the form has not been changed. Here’s something I think — I hear people say, ‘It’s the law of the land.’ I would dispute that. If we go back and read what Jefferson said, if we read what Hamilton said, if we read what Lincoln said — throughout our history, it’s been very clear. The court is not a law unto itself. It can review a law —

MACCALLUM: But these people who are walking in there to get a marriage license are saying, you know, this is the decision of the Supreme Court, we have absolute right to do this — in this state, we have the right to get a marriage license from you. You’re the clerk in this office. That is your job to issue that license. What about their freedom?

HUCKABEE: Well, then they need to go to the people’s elected representatives. That needs to be enacted by the people who are duly elected.

MACCALLUM: But they’re getting them now.

HUCKABEE: Well, and the question is, should they be, without some enabling legislation? Martha, when I was governor, the state Supreme Court could come up with a school funding law, which they did, and they said ours was invalid. We didn’t write new checks to the school districts the next day because we had to assemble the legislature, we had to create the funding formula, we had to authorize it, I had to sign it, then I had to order the Department of Education to send the checks. The reason that’s important is because without enabling legislation, you have only the court saying what you should do, but until those other two branches of government equal to the court have decided exactly what that is, you have no authorization just to go out and start doing it. If you do, you end up doing what — again, I quote Jefferson, Hamilton, Lincoln, as well as the dissenting Justice Scalia, who said at this point, you have five unelected lawyers who overrule everything else in government.

MACCALLUM: I think a lot of people see a difference in a public position and are asking why she works in a public capacity —

HUCKABEE: Why did Gavin Newsom not get arrested?

MACCALLUM: — you know the issues that have come up in a bakery or a private enterprise.

HUCKABEE: But why didn’t Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, get arrested when it was against the law to have same-sex marriage?

MACCALLUM: That’s an excellent point.

HUCKABEE: Why did Jerry Brown not get arrested? Hey, for that matter, I say Josh Earnest —

MACCALLUM: Or for not carrying out sanctuary city laws that are also on the books.

HUCKABEE: There you go.

MACCALLUM: It’s a very interesting question. Religious liberty, I think, is gonna be a very serious issue that’s dealt with a lot in the presidential campaigns.

HUCKABEE: It is a very serious issue.

Thomas Valentine is a researcher for APIA and a junior at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.

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