Our Boy Mike speaks up

Mike Huckabee has been doing a little extra public pronouncing lately, which means there is verbal detritus in the atmosphere that we probably ought to try to clear out.

It seems that Our Boy Mike teamed up the other day with an outfit calling itself the Concerned Women of America, which says it exists to encourage heterosexual kids to stand up to all the bullying they’re getting from homosexuals.

Or something like that. Maybe they don’t mean bullying, per se.

Maybe they mean that they don’t like it that straight kids must endure association with smarty-pants gay ones who are getting all this new legitimacy through the remarkably successful gay-rights barrage that’s just about to cause Ward and June Cleaver to turn over in their graves.

So these mothers against same-sexers brought in Huckabee to do what Huckabee does, which is start talking and keep talking until he’s plumb over the top.

“Just saying we let people love whoever they want to love-that’s not the issue,” Huckabee said in support for the Concerned Women.

Then Pastor Mike strung some more syllables together, only a few bearing relation one to the other.

He said, “Will it force businesses? Of course everyone will say, ‘Oh, no, people still have their rights,’ But they don’t. And every fear that people had has in fact come true-that this is being forced in textbooks on how marriage is depicted. We’re now even seeing television commercials portraying same sex couples. That’s something I guess I didn’t expect to see anytime soon.”

To the extent possible, let’s break down the jumble.

“Force business” to do what?

Actually, the gay-rights movement already has met great success in forcing businesses not to discriminate against otherwise perfectly competent and diligent employees simply on account of how those employees have their sex-or are suspected of having it.

It is not clear whether Huckabee would prefer discrimination. It is not clear what invasions of privacy he would invoke to determine how employees are bodily intermingling at home for purposes of loving expression and/or physical gratification.

Second, textbooks are supposed to present instructional facts to schoolchildren. If a state legalizes same-sex marriage, and then another state does the same, and then another, then at some point a textbook will encounter the need to publish a paragraph or two acknowledging those facts in the context of historical, cultural, sociological or political instruction.

But you know how those history books can be. We’ve got ’em that publish assertions about happenings at Little Rock Central in 1957. If they’d just leave those sentences out, then those things would not have happened. The South would be a racial utopia today.

And as for a supposed violation of anyone’s rights in seeing a same-sex couple show up on the television screen in a commercial-which I don’t recall actually seeing-I wish to explain, respectfully, that Huckabee has it exactly backwards.

No one’s rights are infringed by two same sex people appearing in a TV commercial.

There is this device. It’s called a remote control. You needn’t even climb out of your chair to change the channel if you do not wish to behold such imagery.

But-and here’s the big but-trying to tell a commercial advertiser and a television company that they may not present a same-sex couple in a commercial … well, that is precisely what would violate constitutionally guaranteed rights of free expression.

Let’s break it down even more plainly: We all blessedly maintain the right to think as we wish and say what we want. But we do not have the right to dictate that everyone else must agree with what we think and abide by what we say-or change the channel if we believe the channel ought to be changed.

I understand that many people regard homosexuality as a sin. I defend their free religion. But perhaps they also believe lying is a sin. That does not mean the history books should never make reference to Nixon and Watergate or to Clinton and that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

And the rights of truth-tellers are not infringed when other people go around lying.

Alas, Huckabee sometimes gets carried away in his own glibness, rendering his words as hollow-seeming later as they were profound-seeming at the time of utterance.

That probably is the case with Huckabee’s declaring the other night in a speech to Southern Baptist pastors that maybe churches ought to give up their tax exemption to the greater cause of telling the truth about Jesus’ opinions about contemporary American politics.

He was for Romney, presumably.

I dismissed that little oratorical gem as standard Huckabee hyperbole-until, that was, he tweeted it the next day, and more forcefully. In the tweet, there was no maybe to it. It was time for churches to start paying some taxes and speaking the unabridged gospel, he wrote.

It’s interesting that he waited until he was out of the pulpit and into more conventional show-biz. Only then did he propose letting the government get its hand in the collection plate before he could.

Anyway, I haven’t noticed these preachers, whether right or left, holding their political tongues. So maybe it’s one way to solve our deficit problem.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.