Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is like Some Mafia Thug, Actually Worse

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s actions of late remind me of Season 6 of The Sopranos. Huckabee is like some Mafia thug, actually worse. Tony Soprano never pretended to know Jesus to justify his killings.

Huckabee used quotes from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to justify vile death-producing discrimination against gays and lesbians. His statement (at the June 19 March for Marriage rally in Washington D.C.) was against state judges who have legalized gay marriage and he urged people not to accept those rulings.

In Season 6 the Soprano writers wrote gay issues into the script. The character Vito Spatafore is outed as gay after running into a mobster who is collecting money at a New York gay bar. The other mob characters learn of his “deviancy” and want to kill him. As one says “Being a fag is a sin, it’s against our honor to have him here now.”

Problem is that the mobsters ready to kill the gay guy for being born gay — thus ” sinning” — are all murderers. So are people like Huckabee. Their “moral stand” is made while knowing that somewhere a gay boy or girl in a “Christian ” family is going to be hounded even more because Huckabee and company, continue to use gay bashing as a means to cling to power, fund raise and hold onto the aging white bigots who are their religious right core followers and now the primary/Tea Party heart of the GOP.

And Huckabee and company, who call gay love sin, are also like the mobsters in that in the Sopranos the hypocrisy department is wide open. Huckabee winks at murder while frowning on love. He and his Jesus Goons supported the actual and literal murderer George W Bush.

The evangelicals they curry favor with by bashing gays, and a bunch of fascistic neoconservative warmongers, were responsible for the election of the worst killer in American history. I say “worst” because unlike the mobsters in the Sopranos, Bush had no reason to kill.

More than 5000 Americans – soldiers and contractors — were murdered (yes that’s right, murdered is the word for people killed in war for no reason started by a jingoistic evangelicals fool), 40,000 wounded, 100,000-plus damaged for life, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed, and millions more will now die in the global conflict emerging with “W” stamped on it.

And the W presidency has the words “right wing evangelicals” stamped all over this tragic historic fateful horror that is STILL unfolding. And these people talk about sin! As I point out in my new book WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace there is an altogether beautiful, better and older and kinder tradition of faith out there for the asking. How sad that the evangelicals who take their directions from the likes of Huckabee are doing their best to make sure the name of Jesus is mud.

Meanwhile there is a lonely child in some God-fearing-gun-toting-Huckabee-following-climate-change-denying  family who will kill himself one of these days, driven to despair by churches and parents that don’t even know that Huckabee could care less about them, or, for that matter who is gay. Huckabee doesn’t care about morality just about power.

As for quoting MLK against gay men and women: Huckabee and his friends on the right have have been engaged in a campaign of racist lies directed against our first African American president that put them on the historic side of the people who wanted King dead. Using King’s words against yet another minority is pure filth.

People like Huckabee cling to power by hate and lies spoken in pious tones. They are hypocrites just like those murderer mobsters. Problem is, unlike the fictional homophobic Tony Soprano and the boys, Mike Huckabee and his gang are all too real.