Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is
standing by comments he made earlier this year against transgender
people.
During a National Religious
Broadcasters convention in February, Huckabee joked that he wishes he
had thought to claim he was a transgender woman in high school to
gain access to the girls' locker room.
“Wish that someone told me that when
I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came
time to take showers in PE,” Huckabee said. “I'm pretty sure
that I would have found my feminine side and said, 'Coach, I think
I'd rather shower with the girls today.'”
Huckabee also suggested that
transgender people are a threat to society.
“For those who do not think that we
are under threat, simply recognize that the fact that we are now in
city after city watching ordinances say that your 7-year-old
daughter, if she goes into the restroom, cannot be offended, and you
can't be offended, if she's greeted there by a 42-year-old man who
feels more like a woman than he does a man,” he said.
BuzzFeed brought attention to the
comments the day after the debut of Caitlyn
Jenner on the cover of Vanity
Fair.
Huckabee defended his remarks during an
appearance on the radio talk show of Iowa conservative Steve Deace.
Huckabee agree with Deace's description
of the criticism of his off-color joke as an example of the media's
“misplaced priorities.”
“And by the way, Steve, I take
nothing back from that speech,” he
continued. “I’m kind of glad it's posted because people, if
they watch the whole clip, what they're going to see is that I'm
giving a commonsense answer to the insanity that's going on out
there. Because I hear people, everybody wants to be politically
correct. Everybody wants to be loved by the media and loved by the
left and loved by the elitists. But, you know, I know I'm not going
to be, so let's just get it over with. I'd rather be a commonsense
candidate for people who did take their brains to work today.”
Huckabee had earlier dismissed the
criticism by saying that the only people focused on the comments were
the media.
“What people talk to me about is not
some speech I made four months ago, and it's not some cultural
issue,” he told reporters in Little Rock, Arkansas. “People talk
to me about the loss of their job, they talk to me about the threats
to this country, and that's what I'm focused on. It's why I'm
running for president. It's not to entertain the masses with
comments on the culture news of the day.”