Shorter Mike Huckabee: “The 9th & 10th Amendments make Jesus cry, so away with them”:

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee rejects letting states decide whether to allow abortions, claiming the right to life is a moral issue not subject to multiple interpretations.

“It’s the logic of the Civil War,” Huckabee said Sunday, comparing abortion rights to slavery. “If morality is the point here, and if it’s right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can’t have 50 different versions of what’s right and what’s wrong.”

“For those of us for whom this is a moral question, you can’t simply have 50 different versions of what’s right,” he said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

The former Arkansas governor, who has drawn within striking distance of Mitt Romney in Iowa’s leadoff presidential caucuses, said he was taken aback by the National Right to Life Committee’s recent endorsement of Fred Thompson, the ex-Tennessee senator. (emphasis mine)

This is what never made sense about the weasel words about overturning Roe v. Wade. The same people that said they wanted to do that, always ended up in the same breath characterizing abortion as an absolute unacceptable evil, begging the question of why (since we’re talking about statists here, who think “I think it’s wrong” or “a plurality of people don’t like it” is reason enough for something to be illegal) they weren’t just openly saying “ban it”. Of course, the answer to that was a half-hearted attempt at not completely alienating everyone else. Mike Huckabee’s remark is a media-friendly translation of the religious right letting out a collective “fuck it”.

If it weren’t for the insistence of shoving a rigid set of morals down everyones throats, then I wouldn’t be in the uncomfortable position of having to DEFEND a legal concept that I actually hold skepticism about myself. As someone who feels that true democracy requires radical decentralization to the point where whether a government even exists is an open question — to eventually be answered by “no” — the issue with Roe v Wade isn’t the decision itself but the authority suggested in it. I agree with them on the base yes/no about it, as I’m pro-choice, yet I prefer a society where people who don’t like abortion simply band together and proceed to not have one. As with any other “wedge issue”, the politics behind it turn a difference of opinion into yet another all-against-all war.

BTW: the comparison to slavery is not only biologically & historically nuts (blacks were thought of to be less than human in the sense of animals, not of “pre-persons”), but as it in effect downplays slavery by attempting to play UP abortion, strikes me as at least subtly bigoted. Whether or not something that spends a decent chunk of time being microscopic & cannot yet live outside of its host is equivalent to you or me is in no way whatsoever as obvious as whether or not ones skin color makes them less human. The latter has no scientific basis for any dispute.