Huckabee: "I'm watching these major corporations fold up like a cheap tent in a wind storm and it breaks my heart to see it. . . I was in China last year, I was governor of Arkansas 10 and a half years; the people -- including the CEO of WalMart -- who said Arkansas shouldn't pass this law, I'm wondering: I know Arkansas very well, and I know China a little bit. WalMart does a lot of business in China and there is a lot more discrimination going on in Arkansas than there is in Arkansas."
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Miscellaneous quotes:
Ed Whelan - H.L. Mencken famously defined puritanism as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Progressivism, it seems, should be defined as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be making a decision you disapprove of—and the fervent use of government power to prevent and punish such a decision.”
Peter Steinfels - The whole point of freedom of religion is that it protects an extraordinary gamut of differing, frequently conflicting cosmologies, spiritual disciplines, and moral codes. They may include refusing to fight in defense of the nation, rejecting certain foodstuffs or medical treatments, discouraging young people from secondary or higher education, honoring celibacy or condemning a variety of sexual practices, sacrificing animals, drinking alcohol, or ingesting hallucinogens for ritual purposes, prescribing certain head coverings or hairstyles despite school or occupational rules, insisting on distinct roles for men and women, withdrawing from friends and family for lives of silence and seclusion, marching in prayer through neighborhoods on holy days, preaching on street corners or otherwise trying to convert others to these persuasions.
Religious freedom means I live with the fundamentalists who describe the pope as anti-Christ and my kind as hell-bound—and with the black nationalist sects who consider me a white devil. Religious freedom means that I don’t have to send my children to the state schools if I choose not to nor does my Darwin-phobic neighbor. It also means state schools or state events or state laws should not force people to participate in religious rituals or practices contrary to their consciences. . . . I accommodate myself in the meantime to peaceful coexistence and thoughtful engagement. In particular I refuse to coerce religiously sincere people into personal actions that violate their conscience. And I refuse to dismiss their resistance to such coercion as nothing but bigotry. . . All my life liberals took the lead in defending and enlarging freedom of religion. Now they seem to have shrunk into silence, indifference, or, worse, disparagement. Contrary examples anyone? [more. . .]