Mike Huckabee dropped any pretense of being a kinder, gentler religious right leader when he callously declared literally hours after the Sandy Hook shootings that they would have never happened had the Supreme Court not kicked God out of our schools. But he hasn’t backed down an inch from that sentiment. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch discovered that just last week, Huckabee tripled down on it. He suggested that the solution to preventing school shootings was to have schools hold organized daily prayer sessions and chapel services.
Huckabee was the keynote speaker at televangelist Morris Cerullo’s annual world partners’ conference last week in Nashville. Watch the whole thing here, if you can stand it. Just a few hours earlier, his new book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,” had hit the shelves. He told the crowd that he picked that title because it was his nickname for middle America, whose culture and values are very different from those prevailing in “the bubbles of influence in New York, Washington, and Hollywood.” That disconnect is there because “we’ve lost our landmarks.” One of those, as he sees it, is “the Word of the Living God.”
Roughly 12 minutes into a classic “Christian America” spiel, he recalled that when he was a kid growing up in Hope, Arkansas; his school frequently held chapel services where local preachers told kids about Jesus. They prayed every day at the start of school, and also prayed before going to lunch. Remember, Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp were decided when Huckabee was in elementary school. In those days, Huckabee said, “nobody got hurt” because kids were bringing Bibles to school, not guns. The reason our culture has gone off the rails, Huckabee said, is that “we have no landmark at all” in it. PFAW got a clip.
If you’re wondering how Huckabee can get away with saying this, consider that it’s pretty much an article of faith on the religious right that Sandy Hook would have never happened if those evil libruls on the Supreme Court hadn’t banned mandatory prayer and Bible reading in our schools. Huckabee and his compatriots think that when Engel and Abington came down, God took his hand off our schools–with disastrous results.
Riddle me this, Mike. Would you have the guts to tell the parent of a Sandy Hook victim–or for that matter, the parent of any recent school shooting victim–that if there had just been more prayer in schools, their kids would still be alive? And would you have the guts to say it to the faces of those parents, not from the comfort of a studio or a conference? Unless you’re willing to do so, you need to sit down, shut up, and let those of us who want to love on those parents and not preach at them do so.
Huckabee recently quit his Fox News show because he’s seriously thinking about running for the Republican nomination for president in 2016. It says a lot about the state of the GOP that Huckabee can seriously think about running after making the outrageous suggestion that a national tragedy could have been prevented if we forced kids to pray.
