Huckabee: Jesus is His Co-Pilot
By:
Stan Moody
Besides the fact that there is something uncomfortably wild about Mike Huckabee’s eyes, there is that troubling 1992 statement encouraging quarantine of all AIDS victims – seven years after the medical opinion that AIDS could not be caught through incidental contact. To a public that is tiring (one hopes) of swashbuckling presidents with southern accents, up pops his 1998 sermon to Southern Baptist preachers in
“The reason that we have so much government is because we have so much broken humanity.” True enough, I say, albeit that all humanity is broken to one degree or another. “And the reason we have so much broken humanity is that sin reigns in the hearts and lives of human beings instead of the Savior.” Is that to say that if sin reigned in the heart of the Savior all would be mended? I take advantage of poor syntax, of course. Irresistible!
“Government knows it does not have the answer, but it's arrogant and acts as though it does." Arrogance is, I suspect, in the eye of the beholder. Read on! “Church does have the answer but will cowardly deny that it does and wonder when the world will be changed." That benign stance has been altered dramatically since the Christian Right officially merged with the Republican Party.
These days, the church not only has the answer, it has proclaimed that answer from the pulpits and from the airwaves in violation of its tax-exempt privilege. It has come of age and no longer wonders when the world will be changed. The world will be changed when certain freedoms of choice and certain alternative lifestyles are made unlawful and the nation is thereby declared sinless. There are more pearls of wisdom from the Governor.
“I fear we (the church) will turn and hit the snooze button one more time and lose this great republic of ours.” In other words, the preservation of this “great republic of ours” is dependent, not on the divine initiative of a Sovereign God but on the political mobilization of the Christian public. We must not let incidentals such as Christian doctrine stand in the way of progress.
Has the current legion of theocrats restored this “great republic of ours?”
“I'm often asked why taxes are so high and government is so big. It's because the faith we have in local churches has become so small. If we'd been doing what we should have -- giving a dime from every dollar to help the widows, the orphans and the poor -- we now wouldn't be giving nearly 50 cents of every dollar to a government that's doing ... what we should have been doing all along."
Excuse me, Governor, but what is this “faith we have in local churches?” I thought you were advocating for faith in Jesus Christ? Or is that the Freudian slippage of syntax again? You mention the “local church.” In fact, the local church is an institution of questionable merit these days, overwhelmed as it is by a recalcitrant and unrepentant megachurch spawned in large part by your very denomination whose long history has boasted racism, sexism and apartheid.
It gets worse.
"I didn't get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers – that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives." Let me get this straight. You leave the pastorate where you are urging people to accept Jesus Christ into their lives as the answer to all human woe and go into politics because government does not have real answers to human woe. While I can’t argue with the reasoning, the logic of it all somehow escapes me.
Is the answer to human woe to legislate belief in Jesus Christ so that we can reduce the size of government? Duh! "There's not one thing we can do in those marbled halls and domed capitols that can equal what's done when Jesus touches the life of a sinner." You left the business of touching the life of a sinner for what?
Is there any thinking person left out there who still wonders about that wild look in Huckabee’s eyes?
All this from a guy who recently stated that “Jesus is too smart to run for President.” How about Vice President? The Huckabee/Messiah ticket!
When are we going to hear from the adults?
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