Huckabee's Theocratic Vision

There was a time in this election season when former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was my favorite Republican candidate. Unfortunately, Governor Huckabee has shown some frightening ideas regarding the Constitution.
In a recent speech and subsequent interview with Beliefnet.com, Governor Huckabee argued that we should re-write the Constitution to better reflect God's standards. It's hard to choose a place to start complaining in that series of questions. I'll just start with the first.

Well, I probably said it awkwardly, but the point I was trying to make– and I’ve said it better in the past – is that people sometimes say we shouldn’t have a human life amendment or a marriage amendment because the Constitution is far too sacred to change, and my point is, the Constitution was created as a document that could be changed. That’s the genius of it. The Bible, however, was not created to be amended and altered with each passing culture. If we have a definition of marriage, that we don’t change that definition, that we affirm that definition. And that the sanctity of human life is not just a religious issue. It’s an issue that goes to the very heart of our civilization of all people being equal, endowed by their creator with alienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That was the point. The Bible was not written to be amended. The Constitution was. Without amendments to the Constitution, women couldn’t vote, African-Americans wouldn’t be considered people. We have had to historically go back and to clarify, because there’ve been injustices made because the Constitution wasn’t as clear as it needed to be, and that’s the point.

Governor Huckabee is obviously correct in his assumption that the Constitution was made to be corrected. The founders specifically built an amendment process into the Constitution so that the nation could better adapt its government to modern society. However, Huckabee says that this is not the case with the Bible and that we should amend our secular Constitution to better reflect his interpretation of the unamendable Bible.

Let's take a look just at his example of marriage. If we were to base our vision of marriage on the Bible's, all men could have multiple wives and harems filled with concubines. This view, however, is unacceptable to all but a fringe population in the Christian world, not including Governor Huckabee. This view, however, automatically requires a specific interpretation of the Scriptures, an amendment of sorts.

Now, even if we were to agree that Huckabee's vision of marriage was without a doubt the vision presented by the Scripture, he requires us to take the step of making it law. There have been very few precedents in history where a law has been passed solely because it is based on Scripture. And that is exactly the point. The idea of one religion dominating over all the others was reprehensible to the founding fathers and is personified in this mindset.

Well, I expected to write more about this, and I could go on for pages on this one interview, but I'll leave it at this. I expect to re-visit this in the future, especially if Gov. Huckabee wins the South Carolina primary.