While speaking at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee denounced society's growing acceptance and tolerance and mocked transgender people in a way that only Huckabee can.
via TPM
“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,” Huckabee said earlier this year at the 2015 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Tennessee. [...]
“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.'"
As creepy as this is, it's even more creepy when you consider that Huckabee just recently defended confessed child molester Josh Duggar.
Huckabee's sick personal fantasies aside, there's also a glaring element of hypocrisy that's impossible to miss given his defense of Duggar.
Huckabee went on to suggest that transgender people might be con artists whose true goal is to molest children, saying that young girls might visit the restroom and be "greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man."
That is not a real, existential threat to children, but Huckabee's pal Josh Duggar is. And it shouldn't need to be said, but the idea that teenagers may pretend to be transgender just so they can shower with the other team is not a real threat either. That's a bigger threat to would-be pretenders than schoolgirls.
Those who are out face very real violence, stigma, and discrimination. For Huckabee to suggest that he should have pretended to be transgender is tantamount to saying that he should have placed himself in harm's way for the expressed purpose of becoming a peeping tom.
It's well established that Huckabee is a fire and brimstone wolf in sheep's clothing who would sentence you to eternal damnation with a smile and a folksy "aw shucks" chuckle, and we can write him off as such, but he is running for the Republican presidential nomination.
Until he loses or quits, Huckabee will represent the party.