When Republicans ponder if they are going the way of the Whigs, they do not have to go much further than listen to Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who aspires to be President. Huckabee said after the tragedy in Connecticut last week that because prayer, according to him, is banned from public schools: Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? Huckabee’s God evidently tolerates a misanthropic young man pumping hot bullets into 20 kids and six adults because the Constitution allegedly prohibits prayer in schools. Actually, prayer happens in schools every day.
Had Huckabee been elected President in 2008 – he was the frontrunner at one point – and re-elected in 2012, he would have stood at the podium at the White House from where President Obama spoke to a stunned nation on Friday. But would comfort from a President Huckabee have settled upon the shell-shocked, distraught families of the victims or would blame have rained on them for not forcing the local school board to force the kids of Newtown into prayers clubs?
I cannot even begin to fathom what would have driven Adam Lanza to commit the incomprehensible. And neither can I understand the likes of Huckabee whose view of God is so vengeful and small. All of us have sinned, but I doubt God punishes people who do not pray to Him/Her on a daily basis. Huckabee imagines a God who punishes youngsters for the presumed constitutional transgressions of their parents. Huckabee cheapens God. He cheapens children who had not yet reached the age of reason. For some, Santa Claus had more immediate meaning; and most of them could not even have known what prayer is.