On the same day that he incorrectly claimed President Obama was raised in Kenya, FOX News personality and sometime presidential candidate Mike Huckabee also committed a Freudian slip that garnered much less public attention but showcased the same befuddling absence of logic. Referencing Natalie Portman’s allusion to impending motherhood at the Oscar ceremonies on Sunday night, Huckabee lamented, “People see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having these children, and they’re doing just fine.'”
But it was his next comments that made the least sense: “There aren’t really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie. And I think it gives a distorted image…Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out-of-wedlock children.”
For someone occupying the more extreme fringe of the conservative movement, it seems a bit ideologically blasphemous for Huckabee to concede that, without government, disadvantaged children would not only be malnourished but would also not receive health care. Even excluding the very poor families that are eligible for Medicaid, this leaves plenty of financially struggling families, often unemployed due to the recession, who would have no health care at all under the (Republican-approved) old system.
Perhaps Huckabee should really think twice before campaigning for a job that requires a functioning brain, and stick to his day job with his far more lenient employer, where no such requirements are made of its employees.
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ha, thanks for drawing this to my attention. it seems like a lot of people are appalled at his ungracious characterization of portman (who i don’t think has ever “glamorized” out-of-wedlock pregnancy and does intend to marry the father…), but not a lot of people have pointed out his *interesting* take on gov’t assistance. i’m sure what he really meant was to highlight how many single moms are mooching off the government by being on welfare (bad), but he also does inadvertently concede that such social safety nets are necessary. i sincerely hope someone calls him out on this in coming interviews, and asks him to explain exactly how he feels about gov’t assistance and what he thinks should be done to improve the welfare of these mothers. (hint: overturning roe v. wade is likely to INCREASE and not decrease the number of poor single mothers.)
at any rate, i also find his attempts at further stigmatizing and stereotyping single mothers and their kids pretty offensive. for starters, a single mom isn’t the same thing as an out-of-wedlock mom, though the two overlap in some cases. it’s true that not every single mom is rich, but some of them manage to do just fine. some of them even have children who grow up to be president of the united states.
and speaking of political families, i wonder if huckabee would dare to publicly use the same sort of condescending language when talking about, oh i don’t know, bristol palin’s single, out-of-wedlock motherhood. i’m going to guess not, because when it’s a woman from the conservative fold having a child outside of marriage, the narrative from the right is usually one of: “isn’t it such a wonderful thing that she’s choosing to carry the baby to term? what a beautiful pro-life message!” maybe instead of slamming portman for the autonomous life choices she’s made, huckabee should consider commending her for choosing to go through with the pregnancy and the father for staying involved… at least that would be more ideologically consistent than the crap he was talking on medved’s show.
This is all very true. Given Huckabee’s penchant for mistaking popular fiction for fact, though, I’m not exactly holding my breath waiting for a correction. (In fact, he’s already denied he meant Kenya and stated he meant to say Indonesia instead, which makes no sense in light of the Kenya-specific comments he’d made.)
Oh well. This is why he’s a TV host, and not a president (yet).