GAINESVILLE, Fla. (ABP) — Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says it is culturally acceptable in America to persecute Christians.
In an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness, the former Arkansas governor cited foot baths provided for Muslims at the University of Michigan as evidence that accommodations are made for people of "every faith except Christians."
"It's perfectly legitimate in our culture today to engage in outright persecution against Christians with seemingly no social penalty for doing it, whether it's tearing a cross out of a lady's hand in California who happened to support Proposition 8 or the denigration of Christian values by not allowing even the traditional Christmas carols to be sung at a school," Huckabee said…. "[W]e shouldn't have special rules for everybody but Christians and then those rules are pushed and we become the persecuted."
Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister and past president of the Arkansas State Baptist Convention, preached at a Florida church while on tour promoting his new book, Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America. He also has his own show on Fox News.
The former dark-horse presidential contender said he hasn't decided whether he will run again in 2012. He gave Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin high marks, calling her "a wonderful person" with a "bright future in the Republican Party."
Huckabee said Barack Obama won the presidency in part because he swayed some conservative voters. "The large, simple answer is that Republicans did not close the deal and make a case, because they had not lived up to the advertising of balancing budgets, standing against corruption, being champions for the family and for life as they have been in the past," Huckabee said. "Obama was able to convince people that he was a centrist."
Huckabee said many people told him they supported him but voted for another candidate in the primary because they did not believe he could win the general election.
"Christians should never involve themselves in politics based on the process," he said. "It ought to be the principles, and what this last election revealed was that there were many people who had fallen into the trap of worshipping at the altar of process instead of adhering to the idea of godly principles."
"What I hope is that Southern Baptists in particular and evangelicals in general will recognize that if they are not the voice for life and traditional marriage, then don't expect the secularists to take up the cause," Huckabee said. "If we don't adhere to what we believe to be our biblical and eternal principles, then we have no reason to complain when we lose those principles in the public marketplace."
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