Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Telling it Like it is


Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee has created a stir over a speech he gave a few weeks ago to the Family Research Council, at which he addressed the abortion issue. From the Jewish Daily Forward:

Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee emerged from the recent Values Voter Summit with a new wave of support from Christian conservatives, but he also garnered some unwanted attention from Jewish leaders incensed over his use of the word “holocaust.”

...“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our work force,” Huckabee said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our work force had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”

Some Jewish leaders have taken exception to Huckabee's use of "holocaust," Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League in particular. He fired off a letter of protest to Huckabee claiming use of the word “only trivialize[s] and diminish[es] the horror." I am sympathetic with Mr. Foxman. There are cranks and nut jobs out there who complain, "the Jews think they own the Holocaust" but they do, really; we must remember in six years the Germans wiped a third of them off the earth. Huckabee would be wise to find other words to describe the horror of abortion: "wholesale slaughter" or "genocide" would do just fine. That said, however, Huckabee also earns my huge respect for at least calling abortion for what it is, not dancing around it and mincing words as do many of the Republican presidential candidates; not to mention all the Democratic candidates for every office from president to county clerk.

(h/t Creative Minority Report.)

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