Mike Huckabee And the Gay Shrimp

For those who missed it, Mike Huckabee has been busy lately trying to get his name back in the news for a 2016 run. He seems to have decided that the one issue that might help him pull this off is gay marriage. For the most part, his comments are the usual stuff. Today, however, he said something interesting. Indeed, buried among a dozen or so comments about gay marriage bring about the end of the world, Huckabee said that forcing Christians to accept gay marriage is the same thing as “forcing Jews to eat shrimp.” Really?

This quote more than any other exposes Huckabee’s view of Christianity and it’s an aggressive view I really can’t support. Indeed, let's consider if these really are comparable things. By forcing a Jew to eat a shrimp, you are actively forcing that individual to engage in an activity that violates the dictates of their religion. Huckabee believes that imposing gay marriage into the law would be the exact same thing to Christians. But would it?

Well, no.

In Huckabee’s example, the Jewish individual is forced to engage in conduct they believe violates their religion. Nothing similar happens with gay marriage, however because no one is forced to marry someone of the same sex against their will. Indeed, no one is forced to engage in any conduct that violates their beliefs. The closest you can come is that the Christian individual will be forced to tolerate their neighbors engaging in behavior they consider to violate their religion. But that is truly, fundamentally different from being forced to actively engage in conduct violating your beliefs.... unless you (like Mike apparently) believe that Christianity requires one to control the behavior of others. That’s simply false, however. If you read the words of Jesus, as Mike apparently hasn’t, his teaching are packed with example after example where Jesus admonishes Christians to worry about themselves, and not their brothers or neighbors. There are even admonitions against politicking, though I’ll save that for another day.

Now, you could argue, I suppose, that the shrimp comparison works for those who are required to provide services to these gay people. But again, that seems an aggressive view of the reach of Christianity. Indeed, once again, the Christian isn’t forced to engage in the activity, they are simply prevented from discriminating in the providing of services to the public between people the Christian views as complaint with their views and others who are not. But this is just another form of the first point, and is no more valid.

The closest I can come to finding merit in Huckabee’s comparison is if you assume that by letting the government endorse gay marriage, the Christian is forced in some manner to support the practice through their tax dollars. I have more sympathy for this argument, except there still is lacking some direct link. The government spends so much on so many disagreeable things and the taxpayer pays so little toward this vast budget that the idea of “contributing” to any particular government spending is basically theoretical at best. In other words, my dollar will be spread over so many expensive causes that my contribution to any one thing is negligible. Moreover, Jesus dispelled this argument very quickly with his “render unto Caesar” quote, which makes it clear that Christians must obey the law and cannot be held morally responsible for acts done by the government in their name because they have no power to shape such acts.

Obviously, this whole issue gets into hair splitting. But what fascinated me about the quote was the sense I got from Huckabee that, in his world, Christians have a right to impose their will on others and being denied that right is the same as being forced to engage in the activity itself. If I’m reading Huckabee correctly here, then his view of Christianity is troublesome.

Thoughts?

P.S. Up yours Tom Brady.