When former Arkansas governor and conservative Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee appeared on The Daily Show on Tuesday, Jon Stewart pressed him hard on the issue of gay marriage, knocking down one false argument after another.
As blogger Pam Spaulding at Pam's House Blend commented appreciatively, "Jon Stewart asked serious questions any hard-hitting progressive journalist or political commentator with a talk show is perfectly capable of asking. He made Huckabee explain his positions on LGBT rights and connects it to the messages in his new book about the merits of social conservatism that he's hawking."
"Please watch the whole interview," Spaulding adds. "It literally made me weep because Stewart gets it. This is a human rights issue."
Stewart began the interview by suggesting to Huckabee that there's "one thing I guess I don't understand about social conservatives. ... You write that marriage is the bedrock of our society. Why would you not want couples to buy into the stability of marriage?"
"Marriage still means one man, one woman, life relationship," Huckabee replied. "The only way we can create the next generation is through a male-female relationship. In 5000 years of recorded human history, that's what marriage has meant."
However, Stewart wouldn't let Huckabee get away with that assertion. He pointed out that Huckabee was taking things "back to the Old Testament -- where polygamy was the norm. ... Marriage has evolved greatly over those 5000 years from a property arrangement, polygamy. We've redefined it constantly."
"It seems like a fundamental human right," Stewart said of marriage. "You write in your book that all people are created equal, and yet for gay people you believe that it is corrosive to society to allow them to have the privileges that all humans enjoy."
Stewart then increasingly backed Huckabee into a corner, where in his attempts to avoid admitting that marriage is a fundamental right, Huckabee was left arguing that it is merely a legal arrangement that the government can define as it sees fit. He concluded weakly that "those who support the idea of same-sex marriage have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of us."
"It's a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to make their case that they deserve the same basic rights," was Stewart's response.
This video is from Comedy Central's The Daily Show, broadcast Dec. 9, 2008.
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