Mike Huckabee: Gay Marriage Ruling 'So Illegal' Because It Left Us 'In State Of Confusion'

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has decried the Supreme Court decision striking down gay marriage bans in all 50 states as “so illegal” because it left us “in a state of confusion.”

Huckabee, a strong opponent of LGBT rights, has been a vocal supporter of Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, the elected clerk of Rowan County who spent five days in jail for refusing to comply with a federal judge's ruling ordering her to issue marriage licenses to all qualified couples. Davis has said that issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples would violate her conscience.

(Related: Kim Davis asks for delay in issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.)

In an interview Thursday with FRC President Tony Perkins, Huckabee claimed that Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear could “very simply” alleviate the situation by removing Davis' name from marriage licenses, then added that the governor had no authority to do so.

This confusion, Huckabee explained, was what made the Supreme Court's ruling “so illegal.”

“The governor can fix this very simply by simply saying he'll change the form,” Huckabee said. “Now the question is, does he have the authority to do that? And if so, under what authority? This is where this all gets very confusing. And it's why the haste to rush into implementing same-sex marriage is so ridiculous and, frankly, Tony, it's why it's so illegal is because this has left the whole country in a state of ambiguity and confusion.”

Perkins agreed: “It's chaos, confusion that's been created. And this is just the beginning of what we're gong to see play out here.”

Huckabee went on to reiterate his specious claims that the Supreme Court's decision is not valid because lawmakers have not approved “enabling legislation.” Earlier in the week, Huckabee claimed that the court's 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford – which found that blacks could not be American citizens – was “still the law of the land” for this reason, suggesting that the court's rulings are not enforceable.

Writing at MSNBC, Steve Benen pointed out that the candidate “doesn't seem to understand American civics very well.”

“[A]s nearly every adult should know in the 21^st century, after the 1857 court ruling, the nation fought something called the Civil War, which led to the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution (which banned slavery) and the 14^th Amendment (which, among other things, established birthright citizenship),” Benen explained.

“It's one thing to have a right-wing governing agenda, but it's something else when a candidate invents his own brand of crackpot civics and pretends it's real,” he concluded.