Like generations of middle schoolers and Michael Scott before him, repressed Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee just cannot stop saying weird things about sex.
During his podcast, Huckabee Exclusive, the former Arkansas governor and sex-haver (he’s got 3 children!) took issue with Bill Gates’s assertion that it’s the government, not the private sector, that has historically been responsible for technological innovation. As proof of this, Huck noted that the private sector was behind most life-improving technologies, including Viagra.
“Really?” Huckabee said, according to BuzzFeed. “So, Solyndra was a brilliant investment? Think of every recent innovation that’s made your life better. Some might say Microsoft, but I prefer Apple. There’s the iPad, the iPhone, there’s eBay, Amazon, Uber, even Viagra. How many were developed by the government?”
(Some might say that when your reproductive organs stop working, that’s God’s way of telling you to hang it up and move onto other activities like crossword puzzles and shuffleboard and that taking man-made drugs is tampering with the Lord’s will, but I digress.)
Huckabee has a long history of saying things that are just a little bit… off… about issues that relate to sex, even if they don’t relate to sex at all.
Last month, Huckabee released a campaign ad, titled “Strip Club” and made the argument that, for reasons he didn’t fully explain, the federal government was just like a strip club. The video opened with a shot of a pole and dollar bills strewn on a smoke-filled stage.
“Washington. It’s a strip club,” the narrator said. “The political class dances for the donor class and the working class gets stuck with the tab.”
This is not, of course, how strip clubs work, but Huckabee, whose campaign spokesman told me has never actually set foot in such a club, doesn’t know that.
At the 2015 National Religious Broadcaster’s Convention in Nashville, Huckabee joked that had he known about it as a teen, he would’ve pretended to be transgender in order to sneak into the girl’s showers during gym class.
“For those who do not think that we are under threat, simply recognize that we are now, in city after city, watching ordinances that say your 7-year-old daughter, if she goes to the restroom, cannot be offended and you cannot be offended if she’s greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man,” he said.
“Now, I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE. I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’ You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous, doesn’t it?”
And in his latest book, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy, Huckabee composed a litany of awkward sentences that Freud could have a field day with.
As a child, Huckabee wrote, he never even heard about the concept of homosexuality until rumors started to circulate that the local Boy Scout troop leader was molesting children.
“One of my more worldly fellow Scouts bluntly said that the Scoutmaster was ‘queer.’ I had never heard the term applied to anyone and asked what it meant,” he wrote.
Huckabee said the explanation he received was far too colorful to print in his family-friendly book, but, “to be clear, I am not equating all gay men with pedophiles; I’m just relating how this particular person was my introduction to the then-unfathomable concept of same-sex attraction.”
At another point in the chapter, titled, “Same Sex Marriage and the Law (God and Man’s),” Huckabee wondered aloud about what sort of perverted things homosexuality could lead to.
“There is the issue of homosexuality and other types of sexual preference. Are such variations normal? Which ones?… If man/man and woman/woman marriages are considered normal and acceptable, what about marriage between a man and multiple women? Or multiple men? Are women limited to marrying one man or one woman, but not both at the same time?”
And on… and on…
Then Huckabee attempted to describe sex. He warned that this part could get “awkward.”
It does.
“Male and female bodies were designed by the Creator (that’s my God-centered view and I’m sticking to it) so that they complement each other physically. It’s truly a wonder that the male body has the capacity to physically unite with the female body for the purpose of copulation and procreation. In the act of conceiving a child, a man and woman literally do become ‘one flesh,’ as it’s described in the Bible, in that they create a new individual with unique DNA. (I love that the ‘one flesh’ description of sex was written thousands of years before we knew anything about genetic code.) Sex is also a way for husband and wife to strengthen their emotional connection. And, yes, it’s obvious that sexual union also has a recreational value. Even so, while two bodies of the same gender can engage in a variety of sexual activities, which can certainly involve a deep emotional connection, none of them fit the natural physical expression that is the male/female union as I believe God designed.”
In a chapter called “Bend Over and Take It Like a Prisoner!” Huckabee complained that the TSA was violating the public.
“After years of this indignity, much of the flying public thinks little of it, and they usually don’t complain,” he wrote. “They just dutifully stand there, bend over, and take it like a prisoner.”
In another chapter, “Culture of Crude,” Huckabee fondly remembered Goldie Hawn’s role on the show Laugh Factory by writing that she “danced innocently in body paint and a bikini.”
This, Huckabee said, was in stark contrast to today’s celebrities who don’t dance innocently at all.
He used as his example Miley Cyrus, who “contorted her barely class, barely legal-age body in a disgustingly pornographic performance that showed just about everything she had—except talent… Her awkward choreography and intentionally nasty gyrations, which involved her use of a giant foam finger as a prop to simulate pleasuring herself, were her way of shedding not only her clothes but her Disney character ‘Hannah Montana’ once and for all.”
Then there’s Beyoncé, with her “onstage gyrations [and] bare flesh.” Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z, Huckabee said, “is a very shrewd businessman, but I wonder: Does it occur to him that he is arguably crossing the line from husband to pimp by exploiting his wife as a sex object?”
But, Huckabee wrote, it was important to understand “I’m no prude who wilts at the sound of a four-letter word; I’ve heard every term in the book and maybe a few that didn’t even make the book” and he thinks about them so often that he can’t help but talk about it every chance he gets.