LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) — Mike Huckabee — the once and (possibly) future Republican presidential candidate — staked out conservative political ground in a June 22 speech to Southern Baptist pastors.
While only obliquely referring to the man he might run against in 2012, the former Baptist pastor and Arkansas governor took veiled swipes at President Obama’s policies on the Middle East, abortion rights and gay rights during the speech. It was delivered at the Southern Baptist Convention Pastors’ Conference, held immediately prior to the SBC annual meeting in Louisville, Ky.
Many Republicans have decried as overly cautious Obama’s reluctance to take public sides in the dispute between hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad and reformers protesting his re-election. Huckabee said the current policy made it seem like it was more important for America to “have a tea party” with Ahmadinejad than to stand with Israel.
Mike Huckabee is a former Southern Baptist pastor and past president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention.
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“What we are seeing going on in the streets of Tehran is painful,” Huckabee said, referring to massive protests against Ahmedinijad’s disputed re-election that have been forcibly and violently repressed.
Huckabee called it frightening to see video of protesters in Iran risking their lives, but also found it encouraging “because they know within their own human hearts that something isn’t right about their inability to be free — free in their hearts, free in their spirits, free in their families.”
“God is hearing their voices,” Huckabee said, “and God help us if we do not hear their voices and stand with the people.”
Huckabee, at first considered a long-shot candidate for the GOP nomination, fared well with religious conservatives in many of last year’s presidential primaries. He is now a host and political commentator on Fox News Channel and ABC Radio and is widely expected to run again in 2012.
Huckabee said the toughest politics he ever faced were not while running for president or governor, but in the 12 years he was a Southern Baptist pastor. He served as president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention at the height of controversy between moderates and fundamentalists in the national and state denominational groups. At the time, he was considered a moderate, although many SBC conservatives have embraced him since he entered secular politics.
He told pastors that he did not intend for his sermon to be political, but a lack of moral responsibility is at the heart of many of America’s social ills.
“I would suggest to you that the blood of 50 million unborn babies cries out since 1973, because we have decided that the convenience and satisfaction of the biological mother is more valuable than the intrinsic worth and value of each innocent human life,” Huckabee said. “If we do not speak up and speak out for the preservation and the protection of every human life, then God help us, because I cannot imagine that God would somehow bless a nation that would do to 50 million unborn children what he brought judgment against the Babylonians for doing by the handful on the altars of Babylon centuries ago.”
Huckabee also marveled that people would read in the Bible that God created humans as male and female and then get “confused” about the meaning of marriage.
“People have a right to live any way they want to,” he said, “but nobody has a right to change the basic definition of marriage — because to do so is not simply changing a social institution; it is changing an eternal picture of Christ and his church.”
Huckabee said a lot of the economy’s problems come from “a culture of corruption” that produces characters like convicted swindler Bernard Madoff. “Wall Street did not melt down because it was a money problem,” Huckabee said. “It melted down because there was a moral problem.”
Huckabee said America’s founders never imagined that the government would grow so large, and it happened only because laws had to be passed to “contain those people who are not living in the realm of righteousness.”
“I will not need a great deal of government if I govern myself,” Huckabee said. “If everybody lived by one simple law — the Golden Rule as taught by Jesus, ‘Do unto others as you have them do unto you’ — we would need no other law on the books. We would have no domestic violence, no robbery, no burglary. There would be no murder. There would be not even so much as a speeding ticket if every person would absolutely live their lives as the maxim of Jesus that says you treat others like you want to be treated.”
Huckabee directly mentioned Obama only once in his half-hour sermon. He joked after his introduction about feeling the pressure of following a rousing sermon by Fred Luter Jr., the African-American pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans.
“What a shame that Barack Obama didn’t listen to Fred Luter instead of Jeremiah Wright for 25 years,” Huckabee quipped, referring to Obama’s controversial former pastor in Chicago.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.