Same-sex marriage is the controversial topic of our generation. In the article Huckabee: States Shouldn’t Follow Supreme Court Gay Marriage Ruling published on the Talking Points Memo January 21, 2015, author Caitlin Macneal covers Mike Huckabee’s position on the Supreme Court’s ruling of gay marriage. In the article, Macneal is presenting to us Mike Huckabee’s opinion on gay marriage by using his exact quotes from former interviews he has done on the topic of the Supreme Court ruling. However, the article is more informational than it is editorial. Macneal lacks evidence to support the claims Huckabee is making and she also fails to include her own position on the issue. 

Macneal begins the article by telling the audience that Huckabee is a former Arkansas governor and possibly a Republican candidate for the presidential election. Macneal takes a lot of direct quotations from Huckabee’s conversation with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, but does not provide the audience with any explanation of why or what Huckabee means when he states these claims. Most of the claims that Huckabee makes are factual claims making assertions of what is real or not. For example, Huckabee states that, “Constitutionally courts cannot make a law. They can interpret one”. Huckabee declares that the Supreme Court is not allowed to make the laws; they can only explain the laws given by the states. Huckabee also makes the statement that if the courts make a decision; it is not the universal law. Did Huckabee forget about the Supreme Court ruling on the Brown v. Board of Education case? The Supreme Court ruled that segregation was illegal and that became the law of the land. The dean of the University of California, Erwin Chermerinsky clarifies that the statements Huckabee is making are false. She says, “There have been efforts by states to circumvent or ignore Supreme Court decisions, most notably the intense Southern resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation. The Supreme Court made it clear that its ruling was the law of the land. This will be no different” (Page, 2015, para. 7). Clearly governor Huckabee does not know the correct information on how the laws must be obeyed. Once the Supreme Court makes its ruling, there is no other option. Chermerinsky also says that, “states would have no options if the Supreme Court decided that laws prohibiting same-sex marriage violated the Constitution” (Page, 2015, para. 6). After finding out this information, it is evident that the claims Huckabee is making are untrue. However, without doing further research the reader would not know this type of information, which causes the reader to be up in the air about Huckabee’s claims and Macneal’s motives. Proposing claims without evidence is a reoccurring trend that happens throughout the article.

At the end of the article Macneal provides a link to the Huffington Post’s article about Huckabee’s position on gay marriage. In this article, Igor Bobic, says that this is not the first time that Huckabee has commented on the “theory of nullification” which is a doctrine that says states have the right to declare null and void any federal law they think is unconstitutional. Bobic also states that Huckabee is a “conservative evangelical”. This type of information can lead the audience to believe that since Huckabee is not providing evidence for his argument, he is simply stating them because of his personal beliefs on the topic of gay marriage.

I took it upon myself to read up on Mike Huckabee and I found that he is strictly against gay marriage and makes outrageous comments on why gays should not be allowed to marry. He believes that gay marriage will lead to prostitution and polygamy (Balcerzak, 2013, para. 2). Huckabee makes a cause and effect claim in his interview with Hewitt, stating that he thinks gay marriage will lead to polygamy. His reasoning was “I think there’s going to be immediate cases filed where a person will say, ‘Well, I’d like to marry two women, or I’d like to marry two men for a woman, and who’s to stop that?’” Once again Huckabee is just making false claims to justify his feelings toward same-sex marriage. He does not tell us why it is the right position, only that he believes it is. Clearly this claim and this scenario he provides as evidence is completely absurd and does not link to gay marriage. Macneal provides this information to the audience to show that Huckabee is just spitting out anything about gay marriage to try to stop states in allowing it to happen simply because he does not believe in it.

I researched Macneal’s other articles on the Turning Point Memo and she has written about gay marriage before, giving her the credibility to write about this topic. As the author, Macneal’s responsibility with this article was to provide the reader with information about the ruling on gay marriage and how Huckabee feels about the topic. Since the article is more informational, the reader does not get the sense of why Macneal wrote this article about Huckabee. She does not provide the reader with her side of the argument or her beliefs about what Huckabee says. Does she agree or does she think he is a ridiculous conservative? Those questions are left up to the reader. I believe that Macneal wrote this article purposely leaving out evidence for the claims so that we as readers would think of Huckabee as an ignorant Republican, which is how I perceived him.

Caitlin Macneal’s article, Huckabee: States Shouldn’t Follow Supreme Court Gay Marriage Ruling, had the underlining agenda of making the reader question everything Huckabee is saying, therefore resulting in them disagreeing with him. The lack of evidence and input of Macneal’s opinion on the topic left all opinions up to the reader. Huckabee made claims off of his own personal opinion on gay marriage. As Whoopi Goldberg said, “If you’re not for gay marriage, don’t marry a gay person.” Mike Huckabee could learn something from that.