Huckabee on Life - An Interview with Today's Catholic

San Antonio (Today's Catholic) - The most important issue facing the United States today is not the economy or the Iraq war, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said in San Antonio during a Dec. 11 keynote address to the Majella Foundation of San Antonio at its third annual gala.

Toni Verrips was presented a Courage in Life Award for carrying her twin babies to term after twice scheduling abortions. The babies were born Aug. 24, 2004, which also turned out to be Huckabee's 49th birthday.

"I'm grateful that Aug. 24 will be a special day for them, the day they took their first breaths on this planet and not the day they took their last," he said.

The Majella Foundation provides information for pregnant mothers about alternatives to abortion. In its first three years in San Antonio, Majella bought 825 television commercials and 46 billboards, which produced nearly 9,000 visits to the Majella Web site. The organization also has attracted 116,000 visits to a Web site, www.teenbreaks.com, which provides alternatives to abortion. In 2008, the Web site attracted 116,000 visits Texas-wide, and more than 8,000 from San Antonio.

Addressing some 800 people at the Hyatt Grand hotel downtown, the former candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination said the nation's most pressing issue is how it approaches the sanctity of human life because that tells us what kind of civilization we have and whether we understand that we're to treat each other the way we want to be treated.

There are dangerous implications, he said, in the attitude that some lives are not worth as much as others. "Those are implications that none of us can live with."

"If we teach the generation behind us that some lives are expendable and can be put to death because they represent an interference with the economic well-being of their mothers or a social interruption in her calendar, that generation will someday become adults, and they'll be taking care of us.

"We will have taught them that when we become an economic interference or a social interruption for them, they'll believe they have the same right to terminate our lives in our older years that we thought we had to terminate theirs as infants."

Huckabee was applauded often and warmly, including when he said that the life of an 8-year-old child living in the back of a car, the life of an 80-year-old Alzheimer's patient and the life of a patient with a terminal illness all have equal and intrinsic value.

"I don't ever want to think that one person has more worth than another, because the moment I do, I believe somebody is worth less than another."

He said the signers of the Declaration of Independence understood that every human live has equal intrinsic worth, even though they knew it would take generations to make the principle work in practice.

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"They altered the course of history, in part because of this radical understanding of the value and worth of human life, that no one had more worth and value than another.

"Yes, you can argue that it took 150 years to free African Americans and 200 years to give women the right to vote. But understand the culture from which they came: a culture in which people's worth was determined by their ancestry, or the amount of land they owned, or their last name, or their position in the community, or their occupation or wealth.

"They (the Founding Fathers) challenged that conventional wisdom with a biblical understanding that everyone is of equal worth."

This idea (that every human life is sacred) so permeates our culture, he said, that it's even a part of our military doctrine that a wounded soldier is never left behind on the battlefield, said Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister who is host of the Fox News Channel's "Huckabee" talk show, adding: "I'm grateful for a nation that says a soldier lying out there wounded hasn't lost his value because he can no longer toss the grenade or lift the rifle. Before we value his worth as a soldier, we value his worth as somebody's son, somebody's husband, somebody's father or somebody's brother."

The nation, he said, recognizes that soldier's worth as a person as being so critical that it will risk other lives and millions of dollars in resources and equipment to remove him from the battlefield.

"I'd want it no other way, because the way they treat him is the way they may treat me someday. This is the classic way that we demonstrate that we are a pro-life nation," he declared. "I want to value that soldier in every moment of his life and every stage of his life until he draws his last breath.

Applause also greeted the former governor when he spoke of dangerous implications of saying that a life in a mother's womb has no value. "The life inside her womb is an independent human soul. It's not just another organ in her body. It's not broccoli, it's not a dolphin, it's not a puppy. It's a human life, and it will never be anything else."

Huckabee praised the Majella Foundation for providing a positive message of the value of human life to young pregnant women who may have thought that abortion is their only alternative. "Before we can change the laws of this country, we must change the culture. Nobody else is doing this, or doing it more effectively as you are."

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He said that overturning the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision allowing abortion on demand will not end abortions; it will only hand the issue back to individual states.

"That's the logic of the Civil War. The life of a human being isn't a geographic issue; the country dealt with slavery by deciding we couldn't have states saying in one place that it's morally unacceptable to own other people and others to say it was OK.

"I'm glad we've gotten to the point of saying that a white man cannot own a black man. I don't know of a single person who would defend slavery today."

He said the culture needs a campaign for the respect for human life much like the campaigns that restricted smoking and highway litter and mandated seatbelts in all motor vehicles.

"Every state now has a primary seatbelt law -- except for New Hampshire, whose state motto is, 'Live Free or Die,'" he said, causing the audience to erupt with laughter and applause.

Huckabee said he knows what happens when even good people look the other way when a great evil is done.
The former governor described his family's emotional visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's museum of the Holocaust, when his daughter, Sarah, was 12.

After seeing the horrible depravity of the death camps and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against Jews, he said, Sarah wrote in the museum guestbook, "Why didn't somebody do something?"

"To this day, I've never had to ask Sarah if she got the message. I pray there is never a day when a father takes his daughter and watches her write about our country, 'Why didn't somebody do something?'"

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This story was made available to Catholic Online by permission of Today’s Catholic (www.satodayscatholic.com), official newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, Texas.