Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Skewered

Pam Spaulding has video of Jon Stewart's interview with Mike Huckabee. Huckabee was on the Daily Show to plug his latest book, Do The Right Thing. I can't figure out how to embed the video, so if you want to see it, I'm afraid you'll have to click through to Pandagon.

I think the thing that Huckabee said that was really telling was that proponents of gay marriage hadn't "convinced" enough people. Is that it, Mike? Really? When I woke up this morning I didn't know it was high school debate club day.

Is Mike Huckabee really open to persuasion? I don't think so. Are any of them? I don't know. Certainly the Republican candidates this past year were invested in projecting the image that they were not persuadable about this matter. Even the Democrats would only go so far as to allow that perhaps we should only have a civil union law.

Huckabee also argues that we can't have equality because "gay marriage" is an oxymoron; he argues that for 5,000 years "marriage" has been defined as one man, one woman. Stewart quickly countered that in the Old Testament marriage was one man, five hundred women, or it was conquest and rapine, or one man and his chattel. It seems to me that Huckabee is making an argument about semantics support his position; an argument ad Webster's, if you will.

What if the next edition of Webster's defined marriage as "two adults who have promised to love and cherish each other and forsake all other intimate relationships," eh? What if we change the definition? Huckabee seems to suggest that he'd be satisfied with that. Male bovine digestive end product, I say.

I will end with this quote from John Stewart, who was really on the money:

I think it’s a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to ‘make their case’ that they deserve the same basic rights.

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