Pastor Mike Huckabee... Just Huh?!!

Maybe Frank can explain his neighbor Mike Huckabee.

Man's running for President, as the conviction-since-teenager conservative. He's going to fix his anonymity problem by oureaches and activites that will convince conservatives —like doing an interview with Newsweek.

Now, I read this with interest. Many years ago I heard good things about Huckabee. I am someone he could certainly win over, because I am not happy with any of the GOP front-runners. I'm the sort of person he wants to reach.

But look at some of the questions and answers, and tell me (A) whether you're convinced, and more fundamentally (B) what is he even thinking? The interviewer's questions are bolded.

The Rev. Billy Graham’s daughter, Anne Graham Lotz, once told me about how when she preached at a major Baptist event, the audience turned its back on her. You used to be head of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. Do you agree that women shouldn’t be allowed to be preachers?
It would seem so rude, no matter what a person thought about the structure of a church, to do that. That’s not Christian behavior. One of the unique things about Baptists—every church is its own autonomous unit. My attitude is, let each church make that decision. I go to a church in Little Rock. A lot of people think we’re strange. We don’t fit the mold of a traditional sit-there-stiffly-in-the-pews-church. We don’t even have pews. We focus on ministering to people who are poor. We feed hundreds of kids every week. Our church has offered line-dancing lessons to get people to come. You can be a person off the street with more metal in your mouth than a GM car has on its exterior.

Are you personally against women being preachers?
I’d rather speak up for the Lord than not. I let each person in each church deal with their own conscience. I have enough of a challenge being obedient to God in my own life than to try to dictate to someone else. It’s not an issue for me.

Do you believe that gays are going to hell?
No. I don’t know that Baptists would make a statement that anyone goes to hell based on sexual orientation. Heaven is about one’s personal faith and therefore it has to do with one’s relationship to Jesus, not someone’s relationship to someone else.

I ask because you’ve made a comment about the openly gay congressman, Barney Frank, that sounded pejorative. [Addressing Iowa's Christian Alliance, Huckabee said: "In our lifetimes, we've seen our country go from 'Leave It to Beaver' to 'Beavis and Butt-head,' from Barney Fife to Barney Frank, from 'Father Knows Best' to television shows where father knows nothing."]
It wasn’t intended about same-sex lifestyle. He epitomizes as far left as you can get, far away from the Main Street American way of life.

And then this. The interviewer tosses Pastor Huckabee a wide-open softball of a question:

Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?

Wow. We conservatives often complain, and rightly, about softball interviews with the likes of Hillary! and Kerry and the rest. This is a softball.

So what would you say? You choose to be identified as a conservative Christian candidate for President. With the country and culture in the shape it's in, you have a chance to hit one out of the park, to pick any issue you want, and say anything you want. This is your big chance to convince everyone that you're the man, you have The Vision Thing. You can identify the big issues, and you have answers, you have solutions. You will show leadership.

So what will it be? The War on Terror? The corrupt culture? Broken marriages? Skyrocketing out-of-wedlock birth-rates? Taxes? Morale? Morals? What?

What does Huckabee choose? I will indulge in adding emphasis, but otherwise I'll let his words close this. That, and the title I chose, above.

There’s one issue I want to touch on. A key element of education is music and art education. It’s not expendable, extracurricular or extraneous. The future economy of America is going to be a creative economy. I am very passionate about it. Math, science and language scores improve dramatically when the student has music skills. Spatial reasoning is enhanced by music instructions. It is who we are. It defines us as a culture and a civilization. Very few people my age are still playing tackle football, but I’m still playing bass guitar in a rock-and-roll band.