Mike Huckabee: stuck in the past
- By Mitchell Blatt
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E-mail China.org.cn, January 13, 2015
And yet, one of Huckabee's favorite lines on the campaign trail in 2006 was, "We've seen our country go from 'Leave It to Beaver' to 'Beavis and Butt-head.'" The former was a squeaky clean black-and-white (although without many black people) TV show about a nuclear family that ran from 1957-1963, and the later was a controversial cartoon that ran on MTV from 1993-1997. (Even his example of immoral modern day American culture was 10 years old when he was using it.)
To put it in perspective, the original run of "Leave It to Beaver" was canceled one year before the Beatles played on The Ed Sullivan Show, five years before Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, 21 years before Bill Cosby mainstreamed the idea of middle class black family on network television in "The Cosby Show," and 51 years before the image of Cosby as a clean family man was tarnished when rape allegations against him went viral. In fact, the vast majority of Americans have not actually seen America go through the changes Huckabee describes; 207 million Americans, 67 percent of the population in 2010, had not even been born yet when "Leave It to Beaver" ended.
Trying to end premarital sex by going back to a time when the birth control pill wasn't available would be like trying to end mass shootings by going back to a time before Glocks and semi-automatic assault rifles. When it comes to gun rights, Huckabee adamantly opposes any such measures. "You can take away every gun in America and somebody will use a bomb," he said, after Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. (Huckabee blamed the shooting instead on gays, abortion, and God-less schools.)
But it's not just that 1950s solutions don't work in 2016; it's also a fact that the 1950s weren't all they were cracked up to be. Of course there was deep racial segregation and discrimination against gays and women in many facets of life. But America wasn't even virtuous on the "moral" issues Huckabee concerns himself with.
In 1957, the rate of pregnancy among American teenagers was at its highest level since it has been tracked. The rate now is 64 percent lower than it was then, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and the rate of abortions, for that matter, is actually at its lowest rate since 1976. The reason for these trends isn't because of old-fashioned Christian values but because of condoms, contraception and sex education.
The idealized 50s, like the television shows Huckabee praises, were a fiction.
Stephanie Coontz wrote in her book The Way We Never Were, "In fact, the 'traditional' family of the 1950s was a qualitatively new phenomenon. At the end of the 1940s, all the trends characterizing the rest of the twentieth century suddenly reversed themselves. For the first time in more than one hundred years, the age for marriage and motherhood fell, fertility increased, divorce rates declined, and women's degree of educational parity with men dropped sharply. In a period of less than ten years, the proportion of never-married persons declined by as much as it had during the entire previous half century.
"Not only was the 1950s family a new invention; it was also a historical fluke, based on a unique and temporary conjuncture of economic, social, and political factors."
It is fitting then that when asked about his early success in the 2008 primary, Huckabee attributed it to God. President Huckabee exists in the same realm as the Cleaver Family.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/MitchellBlatt.htm
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