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.

I am so much against guns but I also know that the cat is out of the bag.  You cannot put the potential evil of 200 million firearms back into pre-molten steel.  And I am also aware that people have to defend themselves, much like the Constitution must be defended. But I am also aware of how dangerous men and women who think like Huckabee are.  To be so mindlessly callous towards shattered parents and lost families, their souls flayed by pain, who are searching for an explanation – any reason, any hint – as to why this abomination would happen is itself an abomination.

A woman I know in a high public setting was offended one day when I interrupted her daily biblical reading.  She had sensed that I have little patience for people who ostentatiously make their religiosity a public brand.  “Don’t you know, Jesse, that God is a jealous God?” Seldom at a loss for words, I could not respond to someone whose concept of God is so narrow as to be offensive, well, to God.  Still, all of us must define our relationship with God, so her feelings are as real and as justified as anyone’s.  Huckabee’s comments, however, give currency to the argument that religion today and the Republican party have been hijacked by the self-centered few at a time when the nation needs nationwide consensus to solve its fiscal and social problems, including how to deal with the blood-madness that guns have loosed upon the land.

From a tactical perspective, Huckabee’s comments will be heard by moderate and independent and female voters who might not have wanted to vote Democratic last month but were left no choice by an equally self-centered and overly religious Republican nominee.  These critical middle-of-the-road and independent voters shopping for their sons and daughters and grandkids or smaller brothers and sisters for Christmas almost certainly will have Connecticut on their minds – but surely with a different sensitivity than Mike Huckabee’s.  Upon hearing Huckabee last week, they probably do not regret voting the way they did.

And I bet they will be less willing to listen to this gruesome, heartless right-wing babble in the future.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.