While Fox News pundit, Arkansas ex-governor and two-time presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee continues to score cheap political points with a base accustomed to his pithy, but frequently cruel, commentary on many social issues of the day, the uncomfortable reality it that many of those views represent a sizable share of the American population.
And a recent Harris poll confirms this. According to the Christian Science Monitor website, that poll, conducted in February, found that about 40 percent of Americans show discomfort with a transgender person supervising children, and more than a third say they’d feel discomfort playing on a sports team that included a transgender athlete. The poll showed higher levels of discomfort in the South on nearly every LGBT issue.
This may seem counterintuitive. Other, recent polls have shown that the country is moving toward a decidedly liberal slant in their moral views while so-called traditional values have begun to recede into the background as an issue most Americans are concerned with.
But as a spokesman and poster child, no one quite embodies the fear and, let’s just say it, the disgust that many people of a certain generation – those born before 1981 – and a certain geographic region – Midwesterners and Southerners – feel toward matters of human sexuality. So much so, that when Huckabee says something like: “Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE [physical education],” Mr. Huckabee said at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Tenn., in February. “I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said: ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’ You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous, doesn’t it?” He isn’t just giving us an alternative theory of human sexuality so much as (he feels) he is giving voice to the millions of Americans who feel unheard.
Last Tuesday, late night host Conan O’Brien quipped, “Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said he wishes he could’ve been transgender in high school so he could’ve showered with girls. It’s all in keeping with Huckabee’s new slogan, ‘If this were 1954, I’d be hilarious.’ ”
There were millions of Americans in 1954, too.
