A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on December 19th, 2007 in Campaign News

I have to thank Mark Lewis for bringing this to my attention:

In a recent speech at Liberty University, the Baptist school founded by Jerry Falwell, Mike Huckabee said his surprise surge in the polls was the result of divine intervention. “There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one,” he said. Paraphrasing Mark 6:41, Huckabee remarked, “It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people … There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much, and it has, and it defies all explanation.”

But, there’s another explanation for it:

As a candidate running on morality, he might have a harder time slipping free of long-simmering allegations about his own ethics. As governor, Huckabee battled numerous charges that he improperly took cash, expensive clothing and other gifts from friends and contributors. He was sanctioned or fined five times by the Arkansas Ethics Commission. As lieutenant governor, he received tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from a secretive Texas fund that was financed, NEWSWEEK has learned, in large part by a major tobacco company that was looking for help in defeating a possible national cigarette tax. Though the contributions were legal, and Huckabee says he reported the income, he has consistently refused to identify any of the donors. He tells NEWSWEEK he did not know about any tobacco money. But two of the officers who ran the fund tell NEWSWEEK that Huckabee’s account is not credible. One of them, a former Huckabee strategist, says the governor personally met with a tobacco executive about the fund. Huckabee’s rivals are clearly hoping to goad him enough that he’ll strike back and expose a darker side of his character they say he has so far kept tucked away. The way Huckabee sees it, all the attention—the good and the bad—is a sign that he is where God wants him to be.

Where to start? Oh, yeah - JESUS WASN’T A LITTLE BOY WHEN HE FED THE MULTITUDE!!!!! Or, as Mark put it, “You know, I always thought the Baptists used the same Bible as the rest of us, but maybe I was mistaken about that.”

And let me just say - I really don’t think God cares who becomes the next President. While I can understand, and even have sympathy, for someone who prays that a loved one gets better or comes through war safely, I can’t remember a single Bible story where the prayers for a particular person to rule the country was honored. Usually, God ignored those type of prayers (for fame, glory, etc.) or found a way to answer it in a way that taught a painful lesson.

I’m very familiar with the paranoid idea that “if you’re making people mad, then you must be doing God’s work.” The problem is that you can make all sorts of people mad without doing a lick of work for God. Think Pol Pot, for example. It is possible to make people mad by pointing out how short of God’s glory they come, but it is hardly the only reason people get angry. I’m willing to bet I can make a lot of people mad by stomping on their toe, but that hardly means God wants them to start hopping.

The Newsweek story has some good things to say about Huckabee - and that’s fine. My brother and I were discussing an unrelated matter this past week and I told him that no one is either purely evil or purely good. He brought up the point that it is possible to do good while aiming to do bad and to do bad while aiming to do good. Even the Apostle Paul had this problem - “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”. I brought up two examples of this problem.

First, a woman gets raped in the parking lot at her office. Because she is delayed from getting home, she is not attacked and killed by her estranged husband. The rapist saved her life, but did he do a good thing? He saved her life, albeit unintentionally. I think few people would say that the unintentional benefit to the woman should abbrogate the rapist’s actions and intents.

Second, consider Charlie Wilson - who has now become immortalized in the likeness of Tom Hanks. His intention in boosting the CIA budget was to allow Afghani fighters to repel Soviet agression. One of those fighters was a young man named Osama bin Laden. How much good and evil came of Tom Wilson’s actions? How much should be accrued to his account?

So Huckabee did some good things - and some of them were intentional. But some of what he has done indicates that he’s a man who should not be trusted with political power. Consider this:

But no complaint was more controversial than his involvement with a secretive nonprofit group called Action America. In 1994, a group of Huckabee supporters set up Action America to help the new lieutenant governor advance his political career. At the time, Huckabee was broke. He’d spent everything he had on his failed Senate race. His new job paid just $24,000 a year. During Huckabee’s time as lieutenant governor, the group raised $119,916. Of that, according to tax returns, $71,500 was paid directly to Huckabee as payment for speeches and traveling expenses. When the press discovered the fund, Huckabee refused to disclose the names of Action America’s donors—oddly claiming at the time that doing so would somehow violate federal law.

Those in a position to know say that the organization was a front-group funded by RJ Renolds that paid Huckabee to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton to destroy her ability to launch universal healthcare. Huckabee says he doesn’t remember such things, or even discussion of such things. And the good things he did - like forcing integration of his church in Pine Bluff, Arkansas - sound good until you figure out the details. Huckabee went to Pine Bluff sometime in the 1980s - how brave is someone who forces integration only two decades after Martin Luther King, Jr was shot? Yeah, Huckabee did some good things, but how many of them is he really responsible for? How many initiatives did he push and how many did he simply manage to jump on top of while a Democratic legislature was slamming it down the railroad line?

This is why ideology matters. Jim Wallis could be beside himself with glee if Huckabee wins (I don’t know one way or the other, but Huckabee sounds a lot like the kind of guy Wallis has been wishing for). But the Bible also teaches “What does it avail a man to gain the world but lose his soul.” Huckabee might be willing to give the poor a bit bigger share of the world, but he would sheer our soul from its moorings with respect to abortion and gay rights. He might not be conservative enough for some, but he sure as hell isn’t progressive at all.

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