On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee called out the left’s promotion of Pope Francis’s comments about climate change in his encyclical but ignored his strong comments on the protection of life.
In response to Chuck Todd’s question about whether the former Arkansas governor believed in manmade climate change, Huckabee observed that “the left has completely embraced the Pope's message on climate change, but the Pope in that very same encyclical talked about the science of life.”
Huckabee explained that while the science surrounding climate change is unsettled, the left completely dismissed the Pope’s emphasis on how “there's no justification of taking the life of an innocent person when we know the science is settled on the biology of the human life coming into being at the point of conception.”
The Republican continued to blast the left’s promotion of one part of the Pope’s encyclical and said that he’s “waiting for the folks on the left who love this part about climate change, I'm waiting for them to also agree with him on the sanctity of every human life and that there's no such thing as an unwanted, disposable, or expendable human being.”
Rather than acknowledge the left’s cherry picking sections of Pope Francis’ comments that it agrees with but dismissing comments about life, Todd continued to press Huckabee about climate change and asked “if you’re president, climate change is not on the top of your agenda?”
In fact, since the Pope released his encyclical last week, numerous media outlets have rushed to promote his climate change comments and how it could cause problems for Republican Catholics who question the existence of manmade climate change.
See relevant transcript below.
NBC’s Meet the Press
June 21, 2015
CHUCK TODD: Go to the key point of climate change. A, do you believe it's manmade? And B, do you think that government, if you're elected president, this has to be on your agenda?
MIKE HUCKABEE: Whether it's manmade or not, I know when I was in college, I was being taught that if we didn't act very quickly, that we would be entering a global freezing. And, you know, go back and look at the covers of Time and Newsweek from the early '70s and we were told if we didn't do something by 1980, we would be popsicles. We're all told we're burning up. Science is not as settled on that as it is on some things.
I find it interesting, the left has completely embraced the Pope's message on climate change, but the Pope in that very same encyclical talked about the science of life and how that there's no justification of taking the life of
an innocent person when we know the science is settled on the biology of the human life coming into being at the point of conception. So, let's embrace all of the Pope's message. And I'm waiting for the folks on the left who love this part about climate change, I'm waiting for them to also agree with him on the sanctity of every human life and that there's no such thing as an unwanted, disposable, or expendable human being.
TODD: Alright, so if you're president, climate change is not on the top of your agenda?
HUCKABEE: Well, climate change is maybe the wrong question. Good, stable energy prices and making America an exporter of energy, not just for economic reasons but, quite frankly, to disrupt the balance of power with Russia, Iran and the Saudis. This is a game-changer and America needs to be using the resources that it has, use them responsibly, but, for heaven's sake, use them to empower Americans, help poverty and also change the global balance.
