Parsing the “Ick Factor”
Former preacher, Governor of Arkansas and now FoxNews talk show host, Mike Huckabee is the subject of a profile in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker. I highly recommend reading it if you have a few minutes. For one thing Huckabee, at least at this point, is looking very credible as a Republican party candidate for president in 2012. Understanding a little better about how this guy thinks and ticks could be important.
The biggest takeaway for me was his evangelism. This guy admits to belief in the upcoming Rapture/End Days and, in a back door kind of way, admits he does not believe in evolution.
When Wolf Blitzer pushed Huckabee to say whether he believed in evolution, at a debate in New Hampshire in June of 2007, Huckabee expressed exasperation that the question “would even be asked of somebody running for President—I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book.” He said that the question was unfair, because it “asked us in a simplistic manner whether or not we believed, in my view, whether there’s a God or not.”
As President, though, he would appoint the Secretary of Education. And it is difficult to comprehend what is unfair about the question when he has written, “Everything you do and believe in is directed by your answer to the ultimate question: Is there a God? It all comes down to that single issue.”
It’s hard not to think that if this guy was president separation of church and state would not be at the top of his priority list.
His views on same sex marriage and rights of the LGBT community in general are also particularly troubling.
From the article (emphasis mine):
As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee successfully championed laws that prevented gay people from becoming foster parents and banned gay adoptions. “Children are not puppies—this is not a time to see if we can experiment and find out how does this work,” Huckabee told a student journalist at the College of New Jersey in April. “You don’t go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal. That would be like saying, ‘Well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let’s go ahead and accommodate those who want to use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them.’ ” These comments proved unpopular. On his Web site, Huckabee accused his interviewer of trying to “grossly distort” and “sensationalize my well known and hardly unusual views” about homosexuality. The student publication then posted the audiotape of the interview online. Huckabee had not been misquoted.
As an adoptive parent I find these views particularly appalling. Indeed, children are not puppies and social services agencies are very well aware of this. Prospective gay and lesbian adoptive parents go through the same home study evaluations that straight parents do. As an active member of the adoptive community here, that slap in the face of my same sex parent pals, not only implying that gays are casual and uninterested parents but the follow-up comparison of adoption to drug addicts and incest, leaves me reeling with disgust.
Huckabee expounds further on his beliefs about same sex marriage.
In a recent interview, Katie Couric told him that the Arkansas state representative Kathy Webb, a lesbian from Little Rock, had said, “Huckabee doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of tolerance and good will for gay people.” Huckabee seemed surprised. “It’s not personal,” he replied. “I could argue that people who want to change marriage are angry at me for wanting to keep it like it is!”
But Huckabee doesn’t just want to leave things the way they are; he wants to change the Constitution to specifically prohibit gay people from getting married. He has called homosexuality “sinful and unnatural” and is fond of amusing audiences with the witticism “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
One afternoon in Jerusalem, while Huckabee was eating a chocolate croissant in the lounge of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, I asked him to explain his rationale for opposing gay rights. “I do believe that God created male and female and intended for marriage to be the relationship of the two opposite sexes,” he said. “Male and female are biologically compatible to have a relationship. We can get into the ick factor, but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically, that doesn’t work the same.”
I asked him if he had any arguments that didn’t have to do with God or ickiness. “There are some pretty startling studies that show if you want to end poverty it’s not education and race, it’s monogamous marriage,” he said. “Many studies show that children who grow up in a healthy environment where they have both a mother and a father figure have both a healthier outlook and a different perspective from kids who don’t have the presence of both.”
In fact, a twenty-five-year study recently published by the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that children brought up by lesbians were better adjusted than their peers.
Huckabee’s use of the term “ick factor” with respect to same sex marriage has been picked up now by some of the media, to the point where he has posted a rebuttal of sorts on his website. I say a rebuttal “of sorts” because he actually seems to be arguing that the phrase “ick factor” is a perfectly legitimate way to describe gay/lesbian sexual relations and, in fact, THEY DO IT TOO! or something.
Never once did I say ‘icky’, as many blogs and less than credible news organizations have reported.
My use of the phrase ‘ick factor’ was as the established notion from within the Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Transgender (GLBT) community. It was not an indication of personal aversion, but rather a reference to an established phrase used mostly from same-sex marriage advocates and militants - not one I created.
Wait, what? I kind of think “ick factor” refers to something that is, well, icky. Kind of like the reaction most of us had to any form of sexual relations back in the day when the older kids on the block told us about WHAT OUR PARENTS DO! because they just learned about it in Health Class in PE and YOU HAVE TO DO IT TOO SOMEDAY! Ick. Ickickick. Except when you got older it wasn’t so icky anymore. It’s all about perspective.
And let’s face it, you don’t have to be married to have sex. You can have icky sex or straight lace missionary sex or hot monkey sex with any partner you want without the benefit of marriage. The right to have sex with each other is not what gays and lesbians and their straight supporters are fighting for. Huckabee and his ilk dance around that part with their emphasis on the supposed ickiness of what people do in their bedrooms and ignore the fact that what is really at issue here are the legal and contractual rights which marriage gives to married people. The rights that straight Americans take for granted. Rights that a President Huckabee would actively work to block.
It’s easy to dismiss Huckabee as an evangelical kook but the poll results are what they are and, with his television show, he has a bully pulpit of sorts. And he can be engaging:
Huckabee is not uncomfortable around Democrats or comedians; he is as happy talking to Jon Stewart about abortion as he is interviewing Gayle Haggard about her marriage, as he did on a recent episode of his own show. And liberals tend to like him in return. Even if you find his politics repugnant, you can still find yourself drawn in by his relentless niceness.
Just something to keep in mind as we head towards the 2012 campaign season.
Posted by marindenver on 06/23/10 at 06:52 PM • Permalink
