God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy

by Mike Huckabee

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  I’ve never been ashamed of where I come from or the way I grew up. I wouldn’t trade it for any amount of money. I learned to be resourceful and resilient. Only in the last few years have I earned the kind of money that empowered me to give away more than I used to make. It’s given me mobility, opportunities, and comfort that I couldn’t have imagined as a child. The people who taught me the great lessons of life were largely hardworking, humble, and simple. They had the sort of common sense that was born out of necessity, and were the kind of folks I would hope would show up if I got sick or needed a neighbor to help me hunt for my dog if he got loose.

  My life has been largely molded by people that some might not consider to be “sophisticated.” They’re my kind of folks.

  My wife, like me, comes from such stock. She’s now weathered forty years with me, and has done it quite well. Our marriage has produced three now-grown children, and the four most beautiful grandchildren on the planet, and I say that with all objectivity. To my wife, children, grandchildren, and all my friends who have been part of this journey in the land of God, guns, grits, and gravy, I dedicate this book.

  Acknowledgments

  When you see a turtle sitting on a fence post, you can be pretty sure he didn’t get there by himself. And though a book may be the product of one author’s thoughts, rest assured that a lot of other people are involved. It certainly is true in the case of this precious tome you hold in your hands.

  I owe a lot of gratitude to my family, who accepted my being unreachable many times while I was holed up in my office or my balcony and belting out another chapter to stay on deadline. This is the first of twelve books I’ve written without the companionship of my beloved black Lab, Jet, who died in January 2013 after fifteen years together. I still miss him, but Toby and Sonic, our Cavalier King Charles spaniel and Shih Tzu respectively, have done their best to provide inspiration and companionship when my wife has long since gone to bed.

  St. Martin’s Press has been great to put their trust in me and turn me loose. It’s been wonderful working with their entire team and their editor in chief, George Witte, and editorial assistant Sara Thwaite. And Sally Richardson, president of St. Martin’s Press, won me over at “hello.” Her enthusiasm, depth, and vision for the book have been better than a bowl of grits with cheese and shrimp, and where I come from, that’s good. As a writer, I have loved that I’ve been allowed the freedom to say what I felt and do it in my own voice.

  My agent, Frank Breeden, has been more than an agent. He is a trusted friend who has helped guide me through the turbulent waters of the publishing world.

  Two indispensable partners in the project were Pat Reeder and Laura Ainsworth, who have worked with me for several years as writers and researchers for my daily radio commentary, The Huckabee Report, and who helped research a lot of the material in the book that illustrates the message inside. They not only were of great assistance, but provided tremendous encouragement and gave their opinion when they thought a chapter was good and when something didn’t float the boat.

  Duane Ward and Josh Smallbone of Premiere Marketing, working along with my son David—who runs several of the companies I own—have put together the effort to get me on the road to promote and sign the book in venues across the country.

  Most of all, thank you, for buying (or stealing) this book and investing some of your precious time to read it. I really do want you to enjoy it. I’ve written it for you to easily understand and enjoy. I didn’t write it for academics and scholars because I think it would be over their heads. I truly hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy

  1. The New American Outcasts: People Who Put Faith and Family First

  2. Guns and Why We Have Them

  3. The Culture of Crude

  4. Uniform Diversity—An Oxymoron

  5. Salt, Sugar, Soda, Smokes, and So Much More

  6. “Can You Hear Me Now?” (THE NSA CAN)

  7. Same-Sex Marriage and the Law (God’s and Man’s)

  8. All Grown Up! (Country Folks Can Survive)

  9. Personal Freedom—“GET OFF MY LAWN!”

  10. Bend Over and Take It Like a Prisoner!

  11. Reality-TV Culture

  12. Bailing Out the Big Boys

  13. Environmentalist Hypocrisy

  14. School’s Out: Mass Exodus from Public Schools

  15. Regulation + Taxation + Litigation = Job Migration

  16. The United States Is Falling Behind Other Nations

  17. Grenades in Our Tent

  18. Rules for Reformers—(Redneck Remedies)—The Difference Between Killing Pigs and Making Sausage

  19. Beyond the Bumper Stickers

  Index

  Also by Mike Huckabee

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  THE THREE MAJOR “NERVE CENTERS” of our culture are New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. The nation’s finance and fashion center is New York City; D.C. is the epicenter of American politics and government; and Los Angeles is the nexus for entertainment, whether movies, television, or music. They are the three “bubbles” of influence in our modern culture and they are indeed “bubbles.” I call these cities “Bubble-ville.” I intentionally live in what I call “Bubba-ville.” It’s where “Bubbas” live, and where a lot of people are called by two names: Mary Elizabeth, Katherine Grace, Jim Bob, and Darryl Wayne.

  I travel to New York City every week to host my TV show on the Fox News Channel. Because the show originates from there, most people think that I surely must live there. I’m quick to say, “I don’t live there and won’t unless they will let me duck hunt in Central Park.” I’m quite certain that isn’t going to happen since it’s all but impossible to own a gun in New York City, much less legally use it. Unless you’re a cop or a crook, you probably don’t possess a firearm in New York City. In fact, you’ve probably never seen one in person.

  But it’s more than guns. Have you ever tried to order grits in a fancy Manhattan restaurant? Good luck. Not even for breakfast! And you’ll get some real weird looks if you ask for “sawmill gravy” on your potatoes or biscuits—that is if you can find real biscuits. And I’m sorry, but gravy on a bagel just doesn’t work for me. If I want to chew that hard, I’ll take up chewing tobacco, which I won’t. I’m not even that rural! I can somewhat understand that New York restaurants might not typically have red-eye gravy or chocolate gravy as those might be a bit regional, but how can an eating place that fancies itself fancy have the audacity to open its doors and not have biscuits and gravy or grits on the breakfast menu?

  And while there are some really wonderful churches in New York City, I get the impression that the total number of the people who faithfully attend church is a small fraction of the population. It’s not completely Sodom and Gomorrah, but the traffic at 3 a.m. Sunday is more intense than at 11 a.m. That ought to tell you something.

  Don’t get me wrong—New York is an exciting city and there’s always a lot going on. It’s full of energy and it has a unique “vibe” all its own. But it’s crowded, loud, hurried, intense, and it just seems like its streets are filthy. Even when the trash gets picked up, you always
want to burn your shoes after you’ve walked the New York streets because of all the “stuff” that is ever present on the sidewalks. I can’t find a Walmart in Manhattan, either, and people stare at my cowboy boots when I’m on the subway. What’s up with that? I prefer boots over Birkenstocks. Does that make me weird?

  I feel out of place in Washington, D.C. as well. I really spend very little time in our nation’s capital and only go there when I have to. It’s a lovely city with all those monuments and stone buildings, but if ego could be turned into electricity, Washington, D.C. would have electric power in unlimited levels and never have a power outage. But for a city where everyone sure is in a hurry and acts busy, nothing productive ever happens there. Some people think that because I’m involved in politics, I surely must live there. I don’t. In fact, there’s only one address in that city that I’d probably want to relocate to. ☺

  And Los Angeles has great weather, but the weather isn’t great enough to make me want to sit in traffic for two hours to go four miles on any given day. And getting grits and gravy there is maybe tougher than in New York. If you want to eat seaweed salad, kale, or granola, you can find lots of varieties. But I thought only North Koreans ate lawn clippings, and no one ever looks you in the eyes in LA or if they do, you’re unaware of it because they wear sunglasses all the time—even indoors. I don’t know how they can see well enough to keep from stumbling all over the place.

  So let me make it clear—I’m a proud son of the South, but I can easily relate to folks from the Midwest, Southwest, and most of rural America. I feel a bit more disconnected from people who have never fired a gun, never fished with a cane pole, never cooked with propane, or never changed a tire. If people use “summer” as a verb as in, “we summer in the Hamptons,” I probably don’t have much in common with them. If people don’t put pepper sauce on their black-eyed peas or order fried green tomatoes for an appetizer, I probably won’t relate to them without some effort.

  This is a book about God, guns, grits, and gravy. It’s not a recipe book for Southern cuisine, nor a collection of religious devotionals, nor a manual on how to properly load a semiautomatic shotgun. It’s a book about what’s commonly referred to as “flyover country,” the vast portion of real estate that sits between the East Coast and the West Coast and which more often than not votes red instead of blue, roots for the Cowboys in the NFL and the Cardinals in the National League, and has three or more Bibles in every house. It’s where there’s nothing unusual at all about God, guns, grits, or gravy. It’s not a novelty; it’s not strange or weird. It’s a way of life.

  It’s where I was born, raised, and have lived my entire life. I like it. I feel at home there. I’m a catfish and corn bread kind of guy, not a caviar and crab salad connoisseur.

  This book will be very encouraging to people who live in Bubba-ville. And to those who live in Bubble-ville, it will be very enlightening. After you’ve read it, you’ll probably still want to live in your same bubble, but you might at least for the first time really understand those of us you fly over and look down on when you make the LA to New York red-eye flight and wonder, “Just what kind of people live there?”

  Because most of the movies and television shows portray people living in one of the bubbles, we know you pretty well. We get your unique phrases, attitudes, and even know something about your various neighborhoods. But I don’t think you know us very well. We really don’t live in Bugtussle and we do have indoor plumbing and electricity. So let me introduce you to the land and the people for whom God, guns, grits, and gravy all make perfect sense. After you finish the book, you might just say, “Dang, those good ol’ boys ain’t so dumb after all.”

  1

  The New American Outcasts

  PEOPLE WHO PUT FAITH AND FAMILY FIRST

  IT ALL STARTED OVER a simple chicken sandwich.

  On a Saturday in July 2012, Truett Cathy, the ninety-one-year-old founder of the family-owned Chick-fil-A restaurant chain, was a guest on my Fox News Channel television show to talk about his book, Wealth: Is It Worth It? I had been trying to schedule him for months, ever since appearing with him on the speaking roster for a couple of events and finding his personal background to be one of the great American success stories. I’d read his book and found quite compelling its admonition to use wealth as a means to be generous and not just as an end in itself. Finally, the July date worked out for him to be in New York on a Saturday afternoon when we were taping my show.

  But between our booking of Mr. Cathy and his appearance on the show, his son Dan Cathy, chief operating officer of the company at that time and now the CEO, gave an interview to the Ken Coleman radio show on June 16, 2012, and another on July 2 to the Biblical Recorder newspaper, which is published weekly for and about Baptists in North Carolina. Dan’s comments in support of traditional Christian teachings that marriage is between one man and one woman were blunt, but not unusual or outrageous. He said, “We are very much supportive of the family—the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.… We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that.” Cathy continued: “We intend to stay the course. We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles.”

  Wow! That was really outrageous of him! The very idea that someone would publicly spout the view that a family has value to our society! Dan even had the audacity to talk of a family that included a father, mother, and children all living in the same household and husbands and wives who married and stayed that way. Scandalous!

  And that’s when the chicken hit the fan! By the time Truett was in New York for my show, the controversy over Dan’s remarks had fired up the same-sex marriage advocates—even big-city mayors like Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Thomas Menino of Boston, who publicly vowed to run the Chick-fil-A businesses out of “their” towns because they disagreed with personal comments made by an executive of the company! [The Ken Coleman Show on WDUN, June 16, 2012] There would have been less controversy had Dan Cathy slaughtered live chickens on the steps of Chicago City Hall at lunch hour. But what we witnessed instead was the slaughter of the basic American principles of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and free enterprise. I was shocked that elected officials in America actually believed they could goose-step on top of the Constitution and use the power of government to squelch a viewpoint that they personally didn’t like (but one that, incidentally, was consistent with the will of the electorate in thirty-four states that had voted on the issue of same-sex marriage). It was especially hypocritical in Emanuel’s case, in that same-sex marriage was illegal at the time in his own state. But facts and the First Amendment didn’t seem to get in the way of the bigotry and intolerance directed toward Dan Cathy.

  In fact, the viewpoint expressed by Dan Cathy was the very position held by none other than candidate Barack Obama in 2008. At California’s Saddleback Forum in August 2008, when Pastor Rick Warren asked Obama’s position on same-sex marriage, the then-candidate expressly said he was opposed to it because, as a Christian, he found it not in keeping with his biblical view of marriage. After he was elected President, Barack Obama not only changed his view but went on to become the cheerleader-in-chief for all things gay. (One might even say his opinion was “fundamentally transformed.” Who knew that the “change” in “hope and change” would actually come to describe Obama’s own views?) It’s a reflection of how sloppy and biased “journalism” has become that I cannot find evidence of any reporter asking the simple question, “Mr. President, if your reason for opposing same-sex marriage in 2008 was because of your Christian belief that the biblical definition of marriage meant one man and one woman, has there been an update or revision to the Bible since then, or did you base your decision to change your position on political expediency? If so, were you being
dishonest in 2008 … or now?” Still waiting on that one!

  Truett had been scheduled to speak about his book, not the controversy over his son’s remarks, and I wanted to be faithful to that purpose. Besides, it really wasn’t his controversy, and it was obvious that the book’s publicist, who was with him that day, was nervous that the interview would ignore the book and focus on same-sex marriage. But it has never been my practice to ambush guests on my show. I was raised in the old-fashioned traditions of the South—a guest is to be treated with gracious hospitality. The role of a host is to meet the needs of the guest, not to use that guest to serve one’s own interests. The host offers food, beverage, and the most comfortable chair in the house. When I was growing up, even poor people in the South would dig up something for their guest in the way of refreshments, but criticism and confrontation were never on the menu. If a host had unkind words to say, they would be held until after the guest had gone. Then the first thing said would be, “Bless his heart…”

  Of course, that signaled that someone was about to get filleted like a cheap fish. But while the guest was present, you treated him or her with great kindness and deference. I always assume that’s the way it should be on TV, just as it is in my home. I believe this is why I’ve been able to get some guests on my show who most certainly didn’t share my political views. They were comfortable on my show because if they were there to talk about their movie or book or television special, I didn’t try to force them into an unwanted debate on some hot political topic. Yes, surprising a guest with confrontational questions for which the guest is not prepared might make for “great TV,” but my dear late mother would find a way to come out of her grave and yank me by the ears if she ever thought I was acting like the south end of a northbound mule.

  Truett Cathy passed away in September 2014 at the age of ninety-three. He was a delightful guest and spoke of his humble beginnings, his commitment to treating every customer with respect and kindness, and his resolve to stay true to his convictions, such as keeping his stores closed on Sunday so his employees could go to church if they wanted to. In his nineties, Truett was sharper and quicker than most men half his age. As the interview came to a close, I simply mentioned I was appalled that Dan’s comments were being portrayed as hate speech, and expressed my dismay that a person speaking for himself and not for the company was coming under attack and being threatened with economic retribution and censorship by government officials like Emanuel and Menino. These two mayors somehow thought that they had been elected to be dictators who could use the power of their offices to punish businesses whose executives expressed a personal opinion that didn’t reflect theirs. As I closed the interview, I suggested that people around the country who thought that free speech ought to be protected—not threatened—by the government should join me on Wednesday, August 1, for what I spontaneously labeled “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day.”