At Hugh Hewitt, “A Conversation With Mike Huckabee,” including a text transcript of the entire interview. Governor Huckabee is promoting his new book, Do the Right Thing.
The most interesting part of the interview, however, concerned his
infamous remark suggesting Mormons view Jesus and Satan as brothers.

Huckabee defends himself by saying that the remark was innocent and
uninformed, and that it was not intended to be the focus of the
published story. He adds that he has great respect for Mormons and has
frequently said nice things about the LDS Church on his television show:

But
I on many occasions defended not only Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, but more
recently, the Mormon Church on my television show nationally, and in
other printed material, when I talked about how that I felt like they
were under persecution for having been willing and having the guts to
stand up during the Proposition 8 debate in California. Thank God they
were out there. And they’ve been a strong advocate for traditional
marriage, and I think we ought to appreciate them for that.

The comment still rankles Mormons, and it’s hard to accept
Huckabee’s disclaimers at face value. No candidate for the presidency
regards remarks made in a convesation with a reporter as
innocent. And Huckabee can hardly claim to be uninformed — he has a
degree in religion, attended the Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary
for one year, and is an ordained Southern Baptist minister (all this
from his Wikipedia page).

On the other hand, he’s trying very hard to be sincere in his
repeated apologies and we should probably just let it drop. There is no
shortage of players on the public stage who don’t like Mormons — it
seems prudent to let Huckabee back onto the list of friends and
sympathizers. From the transcript of the interview, here is Huckabee’s full explanation.

Well,
because it was a completely misrepresented issue. It was a conversation
with a reporter. It was an 11,000 word story, or 10,000 word story, and
there were 11 words in it that really was a question that came in the
context of the conversation because he was explaining to me specific
doctrines of the Mormon Church. He was quite familiar with it. I
wasn’t. And I asked him if that were in fact the doctrine of the
Church. And the next thing is it ended up in the article as a part of
it. The Associated Press lifted that out as if that was main focus of
the conversation. I personally went to Mitt Romney in Des Moines, on a
stage, looked at him in the face, told him I was sorry, that I would
never had intended to have done something that would have been
disparaging, and that it absolutely was not my intention to disparage
any doctrine of his faith. And that’s just the long and the short of it.

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