Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) says it’s the bible that makes him a sniveling homophobe.

“I honestly don’t care what people do personally in their individual lives,” Huckabee said in his keynote address to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition.

“But…when people say, ‘Why don’t you just kind of get on the right side of history?’ I said, ‘You’ve got to understand, this for me is not about the right side or the wrong side of history, this is the right side of the Bible, and unless God rewrites it, edits it, sends it down with his signature on it, it’s not my book to change.’ Folks, that’s why I stand where I stand.”

[…]

“Why is it that Christians stand back and take it in the teeth time and time and time again? But we cannot change this country if we do not rise up and vote with an informed mind and a committed spirit and if we’re not willing to stand along.”

Yes, it’s the Christians who are being targeted by legislation in several states and being told they don’t have to be served by businesses that don’t agree with their “lifestyle”; it’s Christians who are being fired just because they’re Christians; it’s the poor put-upon Christians who are literally having their teeth kicked in by roving bands of gay thugs on the streets of New York, and it’s the Christians who hide their own bigotry and hatred behind a book of fiction and fables to justify their own flaws and don’t have the courage to own up to their own issues.  (Hint: only the last one is true.)

Gov. Huckabee missed that part of the tale about “love thy neighbor as thyself” and “turn the other cheek.”  But selective reading is what you do when you’re looking for loopholes to justify being an asshole.

Meanwhile, former Sen. Jim DeMint, now the head of the Heritage Foundation, says the federal government didn’t free the slaves; it was in the Constitution already.

Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people. Unfortunately there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God. But a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people, it did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong.

Um, the part about “all men are created equal” is from the Declaration of Independence, which predates the Constitution by about a decade or so, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which banned slavery, was written and proposed by members of the federal government.  The Emancipation Proclamation was written as an executive order by President Lincoln.

Mr. DeMint has an ironic sense of history regarding the Civil War since he used to be a senator from South Carolina, the first state to secede, and chances are a great many people in his state and of his mindset would be perfectly happy to return to the old times there which are not forgotten.

Finally, one more note from Mr. Huckabee on outreach to women:

Guys like to go fishing with other men. They like to go hunting with other men. Women like to go to the restroom with other women.

Keep up the good work, guys; you’re doing great.