Story here.
WTF?! Brother Michael, you’re running as a Christian minister! Why are you hiding your light under a bushel and then sitting on the bushel?!
What is to be gained by him if he were to give the sermons out?
What is to be gained? Why, the population would see the light and rays of light would shine down from the heavens. Atheists would convert after they read the glorious truth that he has spouted! America would be saved!
It seems only fair that potential voters should be able to see what the guy they may vote for has said in public over the years.
Is he running as a minister? Last I checked he was running as a Republican politician who happened to be a minister.
Now, you may feel that there is little distinction, but Huckabee has been fairly scrupulous about separating his roles here. So in the run-up to a presidential bid, sermons take a back seat to what he did as governor, to me.
The phenomenon of clergymen running for office has cropped up from time to time on the Democratic side, as well. I wonder if Governor Strickland of Ohio should release any of his sermons? Perhaps you should call up the Cornerstone United Methodist Church in Portsmouth and ask them if they’d oblige you.
Meh. If by some small miracle he wins the nod, he won’t win the election, no Republican will, this is the Dems election to win, if they pull their heads out of each others asses, they’ll be the ones to get the next opportunity to fuck up the country for the next 4 to 8 years.
Oh, one more thing, Mother Jones as a source? :rolleyes: MY BIAS IS MY CITE! Damn near worse than Fox, that bunch.
Uh, yeah (what cross?).
This be truth.
Well, to BrainGlutton’s credit, he’s citing something other than The Nation for once.
Not that Mother Jones is better, but tiny steps are better than none at all.
Apples and oranges. Fox dishonestly purports to be “Fair and Balanced.” MJ makes no pretense of being anything other than a left-wing political magazine. That alone is not grounds for suspecting the authors of lying about this. It would be too easy for the Huckabee campaign to contradict them – if they could.
Fair? This is politics, dude!
He did the eulogy at my grandfather’s funeral!
Seriously, I’m not too sure what insights would really be gained from his sermons…they’re sermons, not platform planks. Sermons are high pressure sales talks filled with hyperbole.
Also, keep in mind his church was in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, not exactly a bastion of deep thought. (My dad was from there, and I still have relatives there…I’m not talking out my ass here) I don’t doubt they wouldn’t keep them on file or even know where to find them if they did. Maybe I’m wrong about that…not sure.
But I’m not defending the guy or anything, but he’s said enough in a public, political context to pretty much tell you where he’s at. He’s a hard right religious conservative, duh.
Man, that’s not the impression I get from his campaign.
From a Politico.com interview
That’s scrupulously separate?
Sailboat
While I do think any public statements a candidate has made in the past should be available for voters to use to assess him/her as a whole, I don’t think sermons delivered in person to a single church qualify as public statements. To me, that’s somewhere in between private and public speech – obviously, the sermons were available to be heard by anyone who wanted to listen, so if a member of the congregation wanted to come forward and paraphrase things that Huckabee said as a minister, I don’t think that would be inappropriate. At the same time, though, remarks intended only for a small, local audience are not significantly different from things you’d say to a group of friends or family. We’ve all said things to friends or family that wouldn’t sound good if they were made public, which is precisely one of the reasons why we value privacy. I don’t think he should be obligated to release them.
I don’t know if a “Merry Christmas” ad counts for much here, frankly. All of the candidates were compelled to do Christmas related ads because the campaign season this year has been pushed into the holidays.
I will say that, much as I don’t like Huckabee, this ad was a good bit better than Hillary putting out “presents” like “health care” and “universal pre-K”. Playing Santa with my money is only nice when I get to do it.
Oh, come on. They say they’re fair and balanced because to their audience fair and balanced means “conservative”.
They also do it because they know it annoys people like you. They sit around at meetings and chuckle about it.
Indeed, he’s protected by the First Amendment if he doesn’t want to. Whether this influences your opinion of him is your business, and I don’t know if it is a good campaign move, but he isn’t obligated to do anything here.
Yeah, I mean I’d love to read them, but I’m not going to demand that they be released and act all put out about it until they are. I think there’s enough publicly available material that you can get a fix on what Huckabee believes, and IMO it’s not particularly endearing.
I agree. Just to clarify, when I said he wasn’t obligated to release them, I meant strictly from a “in my opinion, as a voter” standpoint. I don’t think anyone would argue that he is legally obligated to release them.
Huck, BTW, made #47 on this year’s Beast List.
Its called separation of church and state.