Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (R) on Sunday accused “militant activist groups” of forcing A&E to suspend “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson.
Huckabee, who started a Facebook fan page, “I Stand With Phil,” shortly after A&E announced the suspension, said that pro-gay rights groups bullied the network to take action after Phil called homosexuality a sin.
{mosads}”There’s a new level of bullying on the part of these militant activist groups if anyone says something that holds to the same position that Barack Obama held in 2008 when he … made it very clear that he opposed same-sex marriage and he said he did so because he was a Christian and because of his biblical views,” Huckabee told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace.
Wallace asked if Huckabee endorsed Robertson’s comments to GQ in which the Christian reality TV star said, ““everything is blurred on what’s right and what’s wrong… Sin becomes fine … Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men.”
Gay rights activist groups GLAAD and Human Rights Campaign were quick to seize on the comments and protest to the network.
Though Huckabee said he did not necessarily agree with how Robertson expressed himself in the national publication, the radio show host backed Robertson’s right to say them.
“Well, he said it probably in a way that would be probably more appropriate in the duck woods than it would for the pages of a major news magazine, I will say that I saw the world of the south a little differently than may be he did” Huckabee said.
Asked to respond to Phil’s comments that blacks were “happy” pre-Civil Rights, Huckabee contended that the controversy did not center on those remarks.
He noted “that this issue was never about those comments, this issue was specifically about GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign protesting to A&E about his comments regarding same sex relationships.”