At the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition Summit on Saturday, Mike Huckabee took the opportunity to discuss life, marriage, and religious liberty:

The prophet Isaiah said that my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.  And today one of the reasons America is in the trouble it’s in is because too many people in this country have a lack of knowledge of, not only, what this country is all about—how it came to be—but also because a lot of people in this country have forgotten that, like it or not, this country was founded on some basic biblical principles and those principles have been forgotten.  Today, we’ve got people who think that Adam and Eve were on season five of Dancing with the Stars.  They think Daniel and the lions’ den is a story that was on NatGeo.  And they somehow believe that David and Goliath was a country music duo.  The reason that this has had an impact upon us is because the arguments that we often have, the debates, the confusion over things that are really fundamental to civilization—things like what is life, what is marriage—these are only confusing because we have forsaken that basic knowledge that was given to us from scripture and passed down unto us through our many, many generations of history.

Huckabee turned his focus specifically to religious liberty:

And when the government begins to decide how much you can believe, I tell you, something is tragically wrong.  And today we have a government that wants to limit religious liberty, and tell you that it is ok if you believe something but don’t believe too much because if it were to conflict, whether it’s with Obamacare or some ordinance, then somehow it’s you, the believer, who is supposed to yield your freedom, rather than the government step back and recognize that you’re guaranteed under the Constitution the freedom to believe.  And the freedom to believe is the foundation of all other freedoms because the freedom to do something, to make a speech or assemble, to make a paper or even own a gun.  You can’t do something, if you don’t believe something, and if the government restricts what you believe, then it already automatically will be able to restrict everything that you do.  The single greatest threat to all of our freedoms is the threat to your religious liberty.

Huckabee went on, discussing his comments to pastors that Maggie covered last week:

Here’s  what I got in trouble for: I said that we are rapidly moving toward the criminalization of Christianity.  And I think they thought that if they really just attacked me for saying that, that I’d back off.  Well, let me be clear tonight.  I’m not backing off, because what I’m saying is true: we are criminalizing Christianity in this country by telling people who hold to an orthodox biblical world view, of biblical marriage, that if you still believe that, and practice that, and adhere to that, that you will now be guilty of discrimination which could be resulting in some type of civil or criminal action against you. That, my friend, is exactly what I mean when I say it is the criminalization of Christianity.

Joshua Pinho works for American Principles in Action.