Mike Huckabee makes an important point:
Mike Huckabee rallied a crowd of Hispanic evangelicals on Wednesday night, pushing back in the debate over religious freedom just one day after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments to determine whether states have the right to ban same-sex marriage.
“I respect the courts, but the Supreme Court is only that — the supreme of the courts. It is not the supreme being. It cannot overrule God,” he said. “When it comes to prayer, when it comes to life, and when it comes to the sanctity of marriage, the court cannot change what God has created.”
But I am concerned that Mike is a bit selective on this score.
Huckabee, who is famous for dropping 110 pounds, still considers himself an excellent cook, having shared his methods to reporters since Iowa. When handed a bottle of barbecue sauce today, he announced, “Now I’m a connoisseur of good barbecue and good barbecue sauce. My own ribs – my family can tell you – are as good as you can have.”
At another point, he quipped. “When God intended barbecue, he meant it to be pork. Texans go out, they burn a bunch of beef, and they call it barbecue.
Someone said, “I didn’t think God’s people ate pork.”
Huckabee: “That’s before they knew it could be barbecue.”
I’ll allow for a bit of tongue in cheek fun here, but what are we to make of Huckabee dismissing God’s commandment that “the pig, though it has a divided hoof, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you [and] you must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses”?
Now, you might dismiss this as a commandment from the Old Testament, but when Christians talk about their opposition to homosexuality they tend to quote from the Old Testament, too. And Huckabee isn’t just blowing off the commandment. He’s saying that God intended the exact opposite of what he dictated. God said, “no pork,” and Mike’s saying that God wants all barbecue to be pork. And he’s encouraging others to break God’s prohibition against pork, which seems even worse than whatever Socrates allegedly did. It also takes away the common defense that prohibitions against certain foods are not to be taken as seriously as moral laws against, for example, murder or polytheism. After all, it’s one thing to eat a pork sandwich (worthy of a slap on the wrist) and another to be a Druid (a clear stoning offense), but twisting the Word of God is the work of the devil.
