At Hugh Hewitt, "A Conversation With Mike Huckabee," including a text transcript of the entire interview. Governor Huckabee is promoting his new book, Do the Right Thing. The most interesting part of the interview, however, concerned his infamous remark suggesting Mormons view Jesus and Satan as brothers.
Huckabee defends himself by saying that the remark was innocent and uninformed, and that it was not intended to be the focus of the published story. He adds that he has great respect for Mormons and has frequently said nice things about the LDS Church on his television show:
But I on many occasions defended not only Mitt Romney's Mormonism, but more recently, the Mormon Church on my television show nationally, and in other printed material, when I talked about how that I felt like they were under persecution for having been willing and having the guts to stand up during the Proposition 8 debate in California. Thank God they were out there. And they've been a strong advocate for traditional marriage, and I think we ought to appreciate them for that.
The comment still rankles Mormons, and it's hard to accept Huckabee's disclaimers at face value. No candidate for the presidency regards remarks made in a convesation with a reporter as innocent. And Huckabee can hardly claim to be uninformed — he has a degree in religion, attended the Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary for one year, and is an ordained Southern Baptist minister (all this from his Wikipedia page).
On the other hand, he's trying very hard to be sincere in his repeated apologies and we should probably just let it drop. There is no shortage of players on the public stage who don't like Mormons — it seems prudent to let Huckabee back onto the list of friends and sympathizers. From the transcript of the interview, here is Huckabee's full explanation.
Well, because it was a completely misrepresented issue. It was a conversation with a reporter. It was an 11,000 word story, or 10,000 word story, and there were 11 words in it that really was a question that came in the context of the conversation because he was explaining to me specific doctrines of the Mormon Church. He was quite familiar with it. I wasn't. And I asked him if that were in fact the doctrine of the Church. And the next thing is it ended up in the article as a part of it. The Associated Press lifted that out as if that was main focus of the conversation. I personally went to Mitt Romney in Des Moines, on a stage, looked at him in the face, told him I was sorry, that I would never had intended to have done something that would have been disparaging, and that it absolutely was not my intention to disparage any doctrine of his faith. And that's just the long and the short of it.
Originally posted with comments at Beliefnet.
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