Huckabee Cites Lack of Violence in Dismissing Gay Civil Rights Struggle
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.
