With enemies like this, who needs friends?

Wednesday, cigarette #1

The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division in which the main weight went against it. —Brideshead Revisited

Since the Iowa caucus, Huckabee has come under an avalanche of derision, and not just from the Left. Shawn Macomber thinks it's funny that Janet Huckabee says "fixin' to." Pun-happy bloggers are running out of ways to call him a rube (worst so far:"Huckleberry Hound"). Even David Boaz, who should have enough other things to fight with Huckabee about, reserves the first jabs of his Monday column for Huckabee's social conservatism. After three short paragraphs of exposition:

Reporters have been quick to jump on Huckabee's comments in a 1992 Associated Press questionnaire that seemed to confirm their suspicions about a Baptist minister for Arkansas. Huckabee told the AP that "homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle," and called for isolating people with AIDS. That was a position, by the way, that the venerable Reagan had firmly rejected five years earlier. In 1997, then-Arkansas Gov. Huckabee pushed for a reaffirmation of the state's sodomy law, and in 1998 he compared homosexuality to necrophilia.

Huckabee says his rise in the polls can only be attributed to God's will. He endorsed the Southern Baptist Convention's declaration that "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband." He says he entered politics to "take this nation back for Christ."

It is no surprise that Boaz disagrees with Huckabee's positions. His problem lies in putting a sentence like "He endorsed the Southern Baptist Convention's declaration that 'A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband'" in the middle of a paragraph, with no commentary, on the assumption that his readers will find it as ridiculous as he does. The implication of Boaz's column and Macomber's aside seems to be that revealing Huckabee to be a Southern evangelical is the same as showing him to be a hick and a fool.

It doesn't matter that the evangelical vote can't carry the Republican primary. Huckabee doesn't need every voter to be an evangelical, just to regard it as plausible that an evangelical politician might be something other than a demagogue or "the second coming of Pat Robertson." If he continues to do well, every pundit who predicted that Huckabee would have "little appeal beyond the evangelical movement" will have to learn the hard way that not every atheist finds it impossible to take a Christian politician seriously.

Another hint that your pundit Might Be an Atheist: statements like "There is no way that conservative Catholics are going to vote for a guy who thinks they are damned." For any Catholic voter who can file his top political priorities under the heading "culture of death," there's very little in a Baptist candidacy to get upset about. Besides, Huckabee has already shown an interest in reaching out to other denominations:

Some people ask me, "Are you one of those narrow-minded Baptists who think only Baptists are going to Heaven?" And I say, "Dear friend, I'm more narrow minded than that. I don't think all the Baptists are going to make it."

What was that about politics as comedy?

UPDATE: Oops! George Neumayr (another Catholic) got there first.