An open letter to Mike Huckabee.

Mike Huckabee, rumoured to be the Republican Party's main Presidential candidate in 2012, has made inane and idiotic (is that redundant? Close, but no) remarks about Natalie Portman's pregnancy.

For those who don't know, Ms. Portman, who is 29 years old, an Academy Award-winning actress, and a Harvard graduate with a B.A. in psychology (obtained during the filming of the three Star Wars prequels), and who's had a 4.0 GPA since grade school, is pregnant by her partner and fiance, Benjamin Millipied.

Mr. Huckabee slammed single mothers in general, calling them "very poor, uneducated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care." He neglected to comment on single fathers, or men who abandon the women they've knocked up, as if it's only women who have a hand in getting pregnant.




Dear Mr. Huckabee,

Mr. Huckabee, Ms. Portman is not a single mother. I know. I was raised by one. I was raised by my father, with joint custody with my mother, until he remarried. Then I, and my two brothers, were raised by my mother and stepfather, and then my mother, after she divorced my stepfather upon discovering he was not only an alcoholic, but a drug addict. For ten years, my mother raised us three kids without the support of a man, and she did a damn fine job of it, Mr. Huckabee. We made sacrifices. My senior year of high school was the first year that us kids weren't on the free lunch program. Mom worked away from home a lot. But we learned to survive. And we were no less a family because of the lack of male involvement in our lives.

But Ms. Portman is independently wealthy, intelligent, educated, and moreover, not a single mother because the father of her child is actively involved in their lives. Are they married? No. But you don't have to be married to your partner in order to be a family. Do the Christian and Islamic views say that family within the context of marriage is the best way to go? Yes, they both do. But there are a lot of people who never got married and still managed to raise happy, healthy children, despite not having that wedding certificate on display.

And where was your outrage over Bristol Palin's pregnancy, Mr. Huckabee? Bristol Palin is a single mother. She's only engaged to the father of her child when it's convenient for her. She's a teen mother (though my mother was 19, and married, when she had her first child --- or does that not count, because she was married?). If it weren't for her mother's fame, she would be one of the single mothers that you lambasted. So where was your outrage then, over a case far more applicable to what you whined about over Natalie Portman?

One would think, Mr. Huckabee, that in light of your apparent fears of single mothers overtaking America, you would be all for better sex education in schools, that you would want women (and men) to have better knowledge of, and access to, birth control. But no. Despite the fact that "[t]eens who received comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to report becoming pregnant or impregnating someone than those who received no sex education", you still oppose any form of sexual education being taught in schools. You oppose making condoms and other forms of birth control easily accessible to not only teenagers, who are going to have sex no matter how much you tell them no because let's face it, sex feels good, but adults, as well. You oppose funding for Planned Parenthood, which uses 97% of its energies on affordable medical care, including birth control, for poor, uneducated, and jobless people --- mainly women.

Wait. Poor, uneducated, jobless women? These are the people you deny affordable medical care to? These are the people, the women, you deny access to birth control? And then you whine that the majority of single mothers are "very poor, uneducated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care."?

Do you realise, Mr. Huckabee, what a hypocrite you are? You don't want women to be single mothers. You don't want them having babies out of wedlock. You don't want them having abortions (keep your grimy paws off my body, by the way). Yet you deny them the services that would reduce the number of pregnancies they have? And thus would reduce the number of abortions they seek? Mind-blowing.

And what about the fathers, Mr. Huckabee? Why no outrage over the men who get women pregnant and then shirk their responsibilities? There would be a helluva lot less single mothers if men were taught to actually be men and take responsibility for their actions. You may want women to just keep their legs shut, Mr. Huckabee, but as one Internet commenter put it, it takes two to make a baby, and if more men stopped putting themselves between women's legs, we'd have fewer unplanned pregnancies. Why not berate the men who refuse to wear a condom? Why not berate the men who run off after discovering that they've gotten a woman pregnant? Why must you have such awful double-standards, Mr. Huckabee?

You and your ilk, Mr. Huckabee, shriek incessantly about taking away a woman's right to chose what happens to her own body, even in the case of a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. You wail about Planned Parenthood providing abortions, even though that's only about 3% of its entire operations (the rest going to give medical care to those poor, uneducated, jobless women you're so not concerned for) and it requires women to undergo counseling before providing said abortions. You scream about Shariah law taking over America (really? Who's lobbying for that? Which group, of more than ten people, is lobbying for that?). You viciously attack teachers, and firefighters, and police, trying to deny them the right to negotiate their wages (maybe the way unions work needs to be re-evaluted; but outright dismantled?). But you and your ilk, having gotten into office on the promise of creating jobs, have introduced not one bill that would increase jobs. In fact, you and your ilk have slashed jobs, not giving two hoots about the workers you're laying off, the lives you're ruining.

You, Mr. Huckabee, are a self-righteous hypocrite. Go fornicate with yourself. Wait, that would be a sin. Better yet, why don't you work on creating more jobs, like you promised?