31 March 2008

Mike Huckabee is Being Reasonable

Hey, credit where credit's due. Apparently in an interview (transcript here the Huckster said with regards to Obama and the Reverend Wright comments:

And one other thing I think we've got to remember: As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, "That's a terrible statement," I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you: We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, "You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus." And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Now, I'm no fan of Mike Huckabee, but this is a very reasonable point of view for him to have. Huckabee's also much more environmentally-attuned than a lot of the old-guard evangelical movement, and is ever so slightly more to the left on issues of homosexuality and other social issues. While I certainly would never even begin to consider voting for the man for the presidency, he's a much more positive voice for the religious movement than the older generation, and seeing him as a future leader of that movement is probably a good thing overall.

This just illustrates the larger point that sometimes these kinds of social issues resolve themselves over time, and that civil rights for LGBTQ individuals and the like are pretty much historically inevitable. Which isn't to say that liberals shouldn't be fighting for all our might to gain these rights now, but simply that in fifty years our children and grandchildren will look back at these gay marriage fights the way those of us today look back at the interracial marriage fights of the fifties and sixties.

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