In an appearance on “The View” last week, Mike Huckabee congratulated American voters for electing their first black president, noting how far the country has come since the days of segregation. And then — at 0:55 on the video above — co-host Joy Behar asked him about gay civil rights:

BEHAR: You’re very passionate about [progress on African-American civil rights], I see. But do you feel that way about gay rights, too?

HUCKABEE: It’s a different set of rights. People who are homosexual should have every right in terms of their civil rights to be employed, to do anything they want, but that’s not really the issue … But when we’re talking about a redefinition of an institution, that’s different from individual civil rights. And — you know — we’re never going to convince each other of that…

BEHAR: But segregation was an institution, too, in a way. It was right there in the books.

HUCKABEE: But there’s a difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. You had John Lewis getting his skull cracked on the bridges of Selma. Look, that’s wrong…

BEHAR: Gay bashing goes on, too.

HUCKABEE: There’s Christian bashing — look what happened to the lady out in California the other day. She’s out there — she’s 69 years old, holding a cross. People come up — violence is wrong. It doesn’t matter who’s behind it.

Huckabee’s scattershot outbursts reveal the flimsiness of the Christian moralists’ rationale against gay civil rights. First he asserts that there is a magic threshold, a tipping point, of violence that gay people must endure before the majority will grant them equal rights. Then he counters the argument that current levels of hate-crime violence against gays, which includes murder and life-threatening assaults, ought to be sufficient, by citing an incident of “Christian bashing” in which an elderly anti-gay protester in Palm Springs was shoved and the cross she had carried to a gay marriage rally was knocked from her hands.

Footage of the Christian bashing incident, which you can see in the video below, backs up the story that Phylliss Burgess, 69, was shuffled around by the crowd and, indeed, someone knocked her cross down.

So that’s Christian-bashing. Here are just three recent incidents of gay bashing:

In October 1998, Matthew Shepard, 21, “was robbed, pistol whipped, tortured, tied to a fence in a remote, rural area, and left to die …[He] was discovered eighteen hours later by Aaron Kreifels, who at first thought that Shepard was a scarecrow. At the time of discovery, Shepard was still alive, but in a coma. Shepard suffered a fracture from the back of his head to the front of his right ear. He had severe brain stem damage, which affected his body’s ability to regulate heart rate, body temperature and other vital signs. There were also about a dozen small lacerations around his head, face and neck. His injuries were deemed too severe for doctors to operate. Shepard never regained consciousness and remained on full life support.”

In March 2007, Ryan Skipper, 25, “was beaten, stabbed 20 times and his throat slit. His body was dumped by the side of a road in Wahneta, a small town outside Winter Haven, Fla.” The local sheriff, Grady Judd, immediately turned the tragedy into a Jesusland freak show by informing the sycophantic local press, essentially, that Ryan had asked for what he got.

Just last summer, Larry King, 15, was shot in the head by a classmate in a school room. He was rushed to the hospital, but died two days later of brain injuries.

What happened to Phyllis Burgess in Palm Springs was wrong — misguided fools have the right to express their views, too. Mainly, however, she was the victim of rude treatment.

But to compare that incident with murder and physical assault against gays — and to suggest that gays will only deserve equal rights if violence against them increases — exposes the increasing desperation of anti-gay Christians to formulate a credible justification for the marginalization of gays that more rational citizens will accept.

On “The View,” Huckabee, a Baptist preacher and former Arkansas governor who once compared homosexuality to pedophilia and necrophilia, admitted that the anti-gay platform has narrowed: “People who are homosexual should have every right in terms of their civil rights to be employed, to do anything they want,” he said, “but that’s not really the issue … But when we’re talking about a redefinition of an institution, that’s different from individual civil rights.”

In other words, gays have the right to work and pay taxes like everyone else, but when it comes to marriage, that’s an “institution” they are not worthy of.

Why are gays not worthy? Huckabee and his ilk are reluctant to state the real reason publicly, because it simply won’t wash in a civil, non-theocratic society. But here is the wingnut truth that dare not speaks its name: Gays are scourge on society because the Bible says so.

The fatal flaw in this rationale is that the Bible says a lot of things that the vast majority of Americans would not want to see codified into law. For example, Deuteronomy 22:22 says, “If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die.” Similarly, Leviticus 20:10 says, “If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife — with the wife of his neighbor — both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.”

It gets even dicier for adulterers in the New Testament. Mark 10:11 says, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.” Ergo — divorced people who remarry must be put to death. Mark 10:12 makes it clear that divorcees must die, too: “And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.”

Funny, we don’t hear Huckabee and other professional moralizers advocating the death penalty for adultery — despite the fact that, unlike gay marriage, adultery really does destroy “traditional” marriages by the thousands every day.

The plain fact is, these supposed moralists use a couple of obscure biblical admonitions against homosexuality as a fig leaf to cover maniacal puritanism and, in far too many cases, their own internalized homophobia.

They certainly have a right to justify their bigotry with Bible verses, but what our rational, non-theocratic society must decide going forward is whether that the constitutions of more than 30 states, now including California, should have been amended with laws against gay civil rights that were based a selective reading of the Bible by anti-gay activists like Mike Huckabee.