Huckabee on Newtown shooting

On his Daily Show appearances, Mike Huckabee has seemed a nice enough fellow.

Remarks like the following have done a lot to destroy that reputation.

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

Fear of God, after all, did so much to stop the violence of the Crusades, and the Inquisition, and the witch burnings in Salem, and the massacres of nonbelieving peoples in South America by the conquistadores.

If, as early reports have suggested (and I hasten to add that early reports are so often incomplete, misleading, or flat-out wrong), shooter Adam Lanza was mentally disturbed, pray tell us, Gov. Huckabee, how would talking about the Christian God in school have helped?

For that matter, mightn't it have been just as or even more helpful to have taught Adam Lanza meditation techniques used in non-Christian religions like Taoism or Sufism? By teaching students ways to calm their minds and achieve a sense of peace, these techniques might have prevented Lanza's attack. That's at least as plausible an idea as Gov. Huckabee's unproven assertion. Would such religious teachings have the governor's equally full-throated (and ill-timed) support?

Nobody yet knows why Adam Lanza committed this atrocity. It is therefore grotesquely opportunistic for Gov. Huckabee to be pushing his pro-Christian agenda in the wake of these killings, as if pushing Christianity into the public schools would have been a panacea. Shame on you, Governor. Your hucksterism is repugnant.