At an event earlier this month,
Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee claimed that allowing
openly gay troops to serve in the military was destroying morale.
Huckabee, who
has previously pledged to restore Don't Ask, Don't Tell, made his
remarks during an event hosted by American Family Radio's Dan Cella
at Grove Avenue Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia.
Cella asked Huckabee how he would
correct “giving up our national security to political correctness
and a twisted ideology.”
“The morale in our military has never
been lower,” Huckabee
answered. “Among our service men and women, there is a great
sense of discouragement because they did not sign up to be a part of
a special club to try out social experiments to appease those who
push for political correctness.”
Huckabee, who has previously defended
the military's ban on transgender service members, added that he
could not “imagine why we would spend a dime changing the gender of
someone in the military when we have vets coming back without arms
and legs that are waiting months in a VA facility.”
(Related: Mike
Huckabee on transgender soldiers: “The military is not a social
experiment.”)