Huckabee Revises Message on Civil Unions

Mike Huckabee may have flubbed the "civil unions" question with the Concord Monitor last year, but it looks like he's getting his message squared away.

Here's what he told the Concord Monitor last year on the question of whether he supported civil unions:

"I would tend to leave that to the state, as long as they wanted to not call it a marriage. Now if they'd call it a marriage, then I'd have a problem with it, because again, you're redefining an institution, you're not simply allowing people to live," Huckabee said last August. "It's not my chosen lifestyle, cup of tea. But again, that's a whole different discussion than it would be to say we're going to just say you're going to, can have, a same-sex marriage. That's not a marriage. It may be civil union, it may be a same-sex relationship, or a contract."

Not too cool.

But here's what Huckabee told Ross Douthat in an interview with GQ:

Is the strategy shifting because social conservatives are losing on those core issues? Ten years ago, it would have been unimaginable to have gay marriage even in liberal Massachusetts. Now it’s there.
I don’t think the issue’s about being against gay marriage. It’s about being for traditional marriage and articulating the reason that’s important. You have to have a basic family structure. There’s never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived. So there is a sense in which, you know, it’s one thing to say if people want to live a different way, that’s their business. But when you want to redefine what family means or what marriage means, then that’s an issue that should require some serious and significant debate in the public square. And if you look at states that have had it on the ballot—I know in our state it was a 70-percent-against issue. Most states are similar to that.

But if the younger generation keeps going the way it’s going, it could be 50 percent in ten years.
It could.

I just wonder what you’d say to the gay couple who says, “Well, we want to live this way, and my partner can’t come visit me in a nursing home.”
He can with a power of attorney. That’s the fallacy, that this requires some new definition of marriage. It’s simply not the case.

So why can’t you call it a civil union?
Because it really is a precursor toward marriage. Once the government says this relationship is in essence similar to or equal to a marriage—we’re not going to call it that, but that’s what it is—and you grant it the same basic rights as marriage, then you’ve effectively done it.

Apparently Huckabee has figured out that "civil unions" is just "homosexual marriage" by another name. I'm glad to see he's gotten caught up on that one.

Huckabee is pretty liberal in a lot of areas (and this interview explores some of them: global warming, taxes, welfare state, etc.), and he's given a bad response to this question before. Let's hope he means what he says here, this time.