Many in the media love the fact that alongside his right-wing social views there's a hint of economic populism and that he worked with the conservative Democratic legislature in Arkansas.
They're overlooking or downplaying the fact that he says we're not primates or descended from apes, that the earth is 6,000 years old, that homosexuality equates with bestiality and pedophilia, that people with AIDS should be quarantined, that we ought to amend the Constitution to make it in line with Biblical principles. I mean, it's not just me, right, these are pretty out there beliefs, right?
And then there's this:
Salon.com: Huckabee's radical religious friends
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Jan. 18, 2008 | Mike Huckabee, the former Baptist preacher turned Arkansas governor and now Republican presidential candidate, has deep connections to some conservative Christians with radical political ideas. As Salon's Mike Madden details here, while Huckabee talks up his experience visiting Israel in response to questions about foreign policy, he is also campaigning with the support of prominent figures who see Israel as the site of a coming Armageddon. Huckabee's connections within the evangelical movement also extend to leaders whose focus is on the United States; a number of those leaders are working to transform the United States into a Christian nation governed by what they see as biblical principles. On Monday, as Salon columnist Joe Conason notes, Huckabee seemed to hint that he shares at least some of that vision. "It's a lot easier to change the Constitution," said Huckabee, "than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do, is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards."
Ideas like the ones some of Huckabee's supporters hold stem from two radical doctrines, reconstructionism and dominionism. As Conason writes, these ideas come down to "the notion that America, indeed every nation on earth, is meant to be governed by biblical law." Additionally, they stem from a belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, then betrayed by secular humanist liberals who created a myth of separation of church and state in the 20th century, leading the country to immorality and godlessness, and that the United States must be taken back by Christians. Some of the proponents of this idea are unashamed about using the word "theocracy" to describe their goal. The most radical among them -- including two of the movement's leading lights and progenitors, R.J. Rushdoony and his son-in-law Gary North -- advocate a return to the practice of stoning as a method of execution, and expanding this death sentence to the crimes of homosexuality, blasphemy and cursing one's parents.
Ideas like the ones some of Huckabee's supporters hold stem from two radical doctrines, reconstructionism and dominionism. As Conason writes, these ideas come down to "the notion that America, indeed every nation on earth, is meant to be governed by biblical law." Additionally, they stem from a belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, then betrayed by secular humanist liberals who created a myth of separation of church and state in the 20th century, leading the country to immorality and godlessness, and that the United States must be taken back by Christians. Some of the proponents of this idea are unashamed about using the word "theocracy" to describe their goal. The most radical among them -- including two of the movement's leading lights and progenitors, R.J. Rushdoony and his son-in-law Gary North -- advocate a return to the practice of stoning as a method of execution, and expanding this death sentence to the crimes of homosexuality, blasphemy and cursing one's parents.
