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.
Not the best example. A major turning point in bringing the Gospel to the gentiles was described in Acts 10. God comes to Peter and says He has made all foods clean and there are no longer prohibitions. Along with not requiring circumcision of adult male converts, this made Christianity more palatable to gentiles.
So dietary restrictions are not really the best example to use.
Somewhere in his letters St Paul explains why Christians are not bound to observance of the OT Law integral to God’s Old Covenant with the Jews, specifically, but only the OT Law integral to his New Covenant with all mankind through Christ.
And that’s about as much as I remember about the issue, 45 years after studying OT and NT Theology at Holy Cross.
You could look it up.
If you think it’s fishy your problem is with St. Paul, who most certainly did think the strictures of the OT about homosexuality were valid for Christians.
Romans 14.
No problem on the pork/beef thing,
but even in the NT, christianists got themselves in a lot of trouble with “burnt offerings” (BARBECUE!) because that was how you made offerings to Apollo and similar dudes.
Doesn’t really matter. Huck has sold his shriveled little soul to Mammon, whatever lies come out of his mouth.
What you cite is one of the standard arguments that people make to Christians to point out their conscious cherry-picking of their holy book. And while I won’t go into it here, they also have a standard refutation of that argument, though it also relies on selective use of biblical verses.
To point out that there is probably no group of people who demonstrate greater cognitive dissonance than do religious people, particularly fundamentalist believers, is shooting the proverbial fish in the barrel. And pointing out Huckabee’s hypocrisy really only hardens the resolve of people who hold similar views.
As a former fundamentalist of Huckabee’s denomination, I have had many discussions with people of his ilk. And when, after hours of chasing arguments down the Christian rabbit hole and you finally arrive at the bottom, their de facto argument is always going to fall back to “faith”; believing things for which there is no evidence. And once you reach that point, then the discussion has ended. Because you have reached a nadir where the normal rules and boundaries of rational and evidence based discussion simply cannot go.
But to your point, yes, Huckabee is the worst kind of hypocrite. And the fact that he likes barbecue, in direct violation of biblical law, is really the least of his negative characteristics.
Southern churchiness, even in mainline denominations, has always been about picking, choosing, and prooftexting.
Not to mention excessive cross-correlation of the texts beyond and reasonable point–the whole method of determining prophecy by correlating Daniel and Revelation, for example.
It has always been scholarship to say what Southern churchmen wanted it to say, and for a long time what they wanted it to say was defense of slavery. Having been condemned for practicing slavery, they now try to restore the putative morality through this sort of obscure prooftexting while avoiding the clear, consistent, and main messages of the Bible.
Huckabee is a fraud and a grifter.
Well, of course. American Christians believe that the entire Bible must be obeyed, except for the dietary laws and the teachings of Jesus.
Yeah, that subversive left-wing pinko dusky-skinned Palestinian dude is just a troublemaker.
Well, since the Christianists interpret the OT to prohibit homosexuality (as well as St Paul’s parroting of those verses), the Supreme Court already “overruled God” ten years ago in Lawrence v. Texas. So this is water under the bridge, Huckster Mike. After having lost the battle on the “conduct” itself, it seems pathetic to get so worked up over the small potatoes of gay marriage, haha.
As far as I can tell, St Paul is the fountain of most biblical “wisdom” on marriage, which is kind of comical given that Paul’s main point to his fringer Christians of the first century was NOT to marry, being as how the Kingdom of God was just around the corner and the old human world was effectively at an end. Oops. Not that this made much difference or harmed the expansion of Christianity. Keep up the wait, I guess. “Barbeque ye shall always have with ye.” 1 Huckster, v 23.
And where are the observations that the American Right is improperly trying to influence the outcome of a Supreme Curt decision? That’s usually the first charge out of the mouths of GOoPer senators if the left even mentions the existence of a pending decision….
Is he the devil? I think there’s a good chance:
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”
Or marketing the soon to be released authentic Christian barbeque sauce and hogs? Or maybe Mike’s grills with the seal of approval from god. (Made, of course, by the godless heathen in China.)
Oh, is it about time for Mike Huckabee to come out of retirement and grift a little for Jesus.
Ok.
You seem to be arguing from the Seventh-Day Adventist point of view. The most pious Jew in the world doesn’t think a Christian is doing anything wrong in eating pork, because that’s a law that applies only to Jews . OK, it’s kind of cool that Muslims don’t eat pork either, but Christians (except Seventh Day Adventists and so-called “judaizing” sects), have never gone in for that. (Armenian Christians have no actual prohibition against eating pork, but it’s not in their traditional diet; supposedly because of 600 years of Muslim rule, but it could be much older than that.)
The whole Christian religion as far as I understand it, is based on the idea that faith in Jesus does away with the requirements of the Mosaic law. It’s not just Mike Huckabee, or even fundamentalism, it’s pretty much Christianity as a whole.
Christians also interpret the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New Testament, so the way the Jews read it is thereby officially canceled. It’s like, hey, it was a great religion, but even the dinosaurs died out, now we have Civilization, so get with the program already.
Judaism is not a proselytizing religion. If you want to convert to Judaism, it’s because you want to, not because we are telling you that you must, unlike those sociopaths on the subway preaching that, according to John 3:16, I am definitely, unquestionably, going to hell for all eternity, even if I’m the nicest person in the world. (And, entre nous, I am by no means the nicest person in the world.)
Mike Huckabee is a hypocrite and worse, not because he likes pork, but because of what he does to bring home the bacon.
I do believe that Mathew 7:15 can explain a lot of things about this guy…