Huckabee's Biblical Madness: Dispatches From the War on Stupidity

By , AlterNet. Posted January 30, 2008.

Mike Huckabee has made a set of controversial statements about the Constitution (amendable), and the Word of God (not-amendable).

It aroused a fair amount of controversy. Which was good. But all of it missed the real point. The real point, or what should be the real point, is that almost every phrase in his statements was factually untrue.

Whether you're a person of faith or a secularist, or trying to balance the two, the discussion should be based on reality, not fantasies or myth-making. Furthermore, failure to confront the falsehoods helps perpetuate our life in a world of nonsense.

Here's what he said.

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do, to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.

He later expanded on that in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

Huckabee: Well, what I'm simply saying, we've changed the Constitution 27 times in 221 years. But the Ten Commandments are still the Ten Commandments. We haven't added or subtracted any of them, and that's my point, is that the Constitution was created with the understanding that it could be changed, we could make changes. ...

Blitzer: But the criticism is you, in effect, would want to amend the Constitution based on the Bible. Is that right?

Huckabee: Well, it's really based on the idea that we've always had a historical understanding that life is precious. We go all the way back to the Declaration of Independence, when the founders made it very clear that all of us are equal. And equality wasn't based on the point of our viability. It wasn't based on our net worth, our personal assets, or ancestry. At the heart of the pro-life movement is the idea of intrinsic worth in value.

Marriage has only meant one thing in all of our historical settings. It's only meant one man/one woman. When someone wants to change that, what we're looking for is an amendment to say let's affirm, not change the definition of marriage. Let's affirm the definition we have, because some states are trying to change it, creating a huge mess for whether or not another state would have to recognize what one state did. And, in fact, why I think we need the constitutional amendment.

In actuality, it's far harder to amend the Constitution than the Word of God. Amending the Constitution is a difficult and arduous process. Amending the Word of God is quite easy. Any preacher (like Mr. Huckabee), a Pope, a self proclaimed new prophet, even a mere pundit, can come along and say, "This is actually the word of God! Not that old stuff you used to believe!"

Indeed, it happens in the Bible itself, over and over again. It's a big problem for the Western monotheistic tradition. Catholics solved it by not having ordinary people read the Bible for themselves (one of the primary issues of the Protestant Reformation) and having a hierarchy of priests, led by a Pope, to do the reading and then telling people what it means.

Protestants have tried to solve it by developing a whole school of theology called Dispensationalism. It is that God has "dispensed" his wisdom in constantly changing chunks as mankind was prepared to understand them, and it's our collective fault that He didn't set it out clearly the first time.

Islam took the view that the Jews and Christians had corrupted the texts and so God sent Gabriel to Mohammed with a final set of revisions. Joseph Smith was visited by God and Jesus Christ, who told him more or less the same thing (except the bit about Mohammed). Then the Angel Moroni told him where some golden tablets with a different set of revisions written by a guy named Mormon were buried. Smith dug them up. They were in "reformed Egyptian." He translated them, then gave them back to Angel Moroni.

Huckabee says " the Ten Commandments are still the Ten Commandments." Let us leave aside the facts that there are three different versions of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament and the only one so labeled bears little resemblance to the one usually referred to by that name, and that Protestants, Jews, and Catholics each use a slightly different set of even that one.

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Larry Beinhart is the author of "Wag the Dog," "The Librarian," and "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin." All available at nationbooks.org.

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