I am sure that by now you have seen posts about the profile on Mike Huckabee in the New Yorker in which he admits that his opposition to gay marriage stems, at least in part, to “the ick factor” while also joking that he’d be fully in support of gay marriage if his only choices were Nancy Pelos or Helen Thomas. Typical Huckabee.
Anyway, I want to focus on some of the other interesting nuggest contained in the piece, like this:
In her kitchen is a watercolor painting of a house surrounded by trees, with the words “To Janet Huckabee, 1995 full-time homemaker of the year, presented by the Eagle Forum and Phyllis Schlafly.”
The profile also looks at how Huckabee got his start back in 1970s working for right-wing evangelist James Robison:
In 1976, after college, Huckabee was enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Texas, when he came into contact with the televangelist James Robison. It was Robison who famously declared that he was “sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the Communists coming out of the closet,” and was ready “for God’s people to come out of the closet” and take back the nation. Despite Huckabee’s inclination toward a forgiving Christianity, Robison’s passion drew him in. He dropped out of seminary after one year to take a job as Robison’s director of communications.
“The way the Moral Majority movement was actually started was there was a rally that James Robison did in 1979 that I helped coördinate,” Huckabee said. “It was all because of the local television station in Dallas throwing him off the air, because, in a sermon that he preached on television, Robison said homosexuality is a sin. Think: 1979, it wasn’t really an outrageous statement. Anyway, they got some complaints and they told him he couldn’t be on television. Well, Texas? Are you kidding me?” More than ten thousand Christians came to a “Freedom Rally” at the Reunion Arena, in Dallas, to protest Robison’s expulsion. “There was this amazing energy coming up from these evangelical Christians,” Huckabee said. “I remember almost being frightened by it. If someone had gotten to the microphone and said, ‘Let’s go four blocks from here and take Channel 8 apart,’ that audience would’ve taken the last brick off the building.”
Today, the name Robison is almost unknown, but he is still around and active – in fact, the video I posted of Jim Garlow just last week was taken from an interview he did with Robison earlier this year.
Back in the Religious Right’s heyday in the 1980s, Robison was a key leader and so this seems like a good time to repost this video we put together back in 2007 to provide a sense of just who Huckabee dropped out of seminary to follow:
