By Melanie Asmar

On Valentine's Day 2005, Mike Huckabee and his wife, Janet, were married all over again. Then governor of Arkansas, Huckabee hoped the super-public ceremony - which took place in an arena full of more than 6,000 people - would spark a wave of covenant marriages, legal contracts available in only three states that commit couples to counseling and a two-year waiting period before divorce.

At one point during the ceremony, a whistle sounded and about two dozen protesters stood up, according to The New York Times. They unfurled a banner: "Queer equality now."

Huckabee ignored them, the Times reported, and went on with the ceremony.

Arkansans who watched Huckabee during his 10½-year tenure said that gesture was emblematic of his approach to gay-rights issues: He paid them little mind unless pressed. But his stances have attracted attention recently after a report that Huckabee advocated isolating AIDS patients in 1992.

Observers said Huckabee's positions on gay rights fell in line with those of most social conservatives: He supported a constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and he opposed allowing gays to become foster parents. But, they said, Huckabee didn't make those issues priorities, focusing instead on issues such as education and health care.

"He may well be a mean-spirited, gay-bashing Christian evangelical in his heart of hearts," said Janine Parry, who teaches Arkansas politics at the University of Arkansas, "but it's not how he governed. He didn't use the bully pulpit to bully gays and lesbians. He could have, but he didn't."

As a U.S. Senate candidate in 1992, Huckabee wrote in an Associated Press questionnaire that homosexuality was an "aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle" that posed "a dangerous public health risk." Huckabee has since said he won't run from the statement but would express it differently today.

A comment he made in a meeting with Monitor editors in August 2006 has also drawn scrutiny. As Huckabee has risen from an asterisk to leading the polls in Iowa, the news media - and his opponents - have seized on his suggestion then that he supported state-level civil unions.

"I would tend to leave (the question of civil unions) to the state, as long as they wanted to not call it a marriage," Huckabee said in 2006. "Now if they'd call it a marriage, then I'd have a problem with it."

When he returned to the Monitor this month, he was asked to clarify his position.

"I've never supported civil unions, and I don't," Huckabee said. "I don't know, honestly, how I said what I said (in 2006) other than, 'Hey, that's something New Hampshire has to deal with.' "

Huckabee said civil unions are a "precursor to same-sex marriage." In some ways, he said, they're the same because to dissolve one, a couple would essentially divorce. Huckabee added he's not familiar with the specifics of New Hampshire's law, because he's never "been interested in a civil union myself."

That last comment is characteristic of the way Huckabee spoke about gay-rights issues during his time as governor, liberal observers said. Rita Sklar, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, said Huckabee's rhetoric was often "extremely unpleasant or sarcastic."

"He is hardly ever outright nasty," Sklar said. "But he is suggestively nasty."

In 1997, six months after Huckabee became governor, the Arkansas legislature passed a law banning same-sex marriage. Huckabee supported it and put forth an amendment that said Arkansas should prohibit sodomy to protect the traditional family structure.

Press accounts suggest that Huckabee didn't make any big speeches in support of the law. A poll taken weeks before the law passed showed 79 percent of Arkansans supported it.

Jay Barth, an Arkansas political science professor who wrote a book about Arkansas politics, said Huckabee was "a very smart politician who gained an understanding on where Arkansans were."

In 2004, when a conservative group successfully lobbied to get a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage on the ballot, Huckabee took a similar approach. The Arkansas Marriage Amendment Committee announced its intentions at a news conference in the governor's reception room at the capitol. Huckabee, however, wasn't there. He was on a nine-day economic development trip to Asia.

Huckabee lent his support to the group and its cause through a spokesman, press accounts said.

"This isn't a ban on 'gay marriage' since, for those of us who believe in the biblical and historical definition, there's no such thing as 'gay marriage,' " said Huckabee, a former Baptist minister. "We can disagree yet respect a homosexual relationship between two consenting adults. But when government is asked to approve the relationship, the people have a right to maintain the traditional definition of marriage."

Barth said Huckabee let other Republicans lead on gay-rights issues. The amendment passed with 75 percent of the vote.

"When the issues became front and center, he toned (it) down in his public statements," Barth said. But, he added, "we have little insight into what went on in churches where he preached. . . . We don't know what Mike Huckabee the preacher was saying during those years, but what Mike Huckabee the politician was saying were conservative things, but not in a hard-edged type of way."

Foster parenting

Beginning in 1998, Huckabee dealt with a different gay-rights issue, one that ended in a lawsuit: whether gay men and lesbians could be foster parents. That year, a child welfare board that Huckabee helped create barred homosexuals and unmarried heterosexuals from serving as foster parents.

Again, Huckabee first commented through a spokesman. "It is not in the best interest of children for them to be placed in an environment that the Legislature has specifically and purposely removed from legal sanction and recognition," he said. The spokesman also said Huckabee opposed removing a child from a heterosexual home on a "mere accusation" and placing him or her with gay foster parents.

In 1999, a gay couple, a lesbian and a heterosexual man who couldn't be a foster parent because he lived with his gay son sued the Arkansas Department of Health and Human Services and the child welfare board. In 2006, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The high court upheld a lower court decision that the ban on gay foster parents sought to improperly regulate "public morality."

But in 2004, after the lower court ruling, the legislature had changed the law to prohibit unmarried cohabitating couples from being foster parents. When asked about the Supreme Court decision by a group of Iowa Republicans a month later, Huckabee told them the state's rule barring unmarried couples from serving as foster parents "probably takes care of it," according to the Associated Press.

Huckabee added that lawmakers would move swiftly to ban gays and lesbians from becoming foster parents. The Arkansas legislature has thus far been unsuccessful in doing so. Nebraska and Utah are the only two states to ban gay foster parents, according to a 2007 report by The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic and social research policy group.

In a recent Monitor interview, Huckabee said he thought the people pushing to allow gays and lesbians to be foster parents were acting out of their own personal interests, not those of children.

"I felt, and I still feel, any decision ought to be in the best interest of the child and it ought not to be about making a point or taking a position for social change," Huckabee said. "I felt that many of the people who were pushing it were not pushing it so much because their first concern was for the children. Their concern was for their rights to be able to . . . be foster parents.

'Cultural conflicts'

Huckabee's 1992 AIDS comments were not his last on the subject. He spoke about AIDS while in office in Arkansas and wrote about the disease in his second book, where he cited AIDS and homosexuality as two of the "cultural conflicts" fragmenting the country in the late 1990s.

In 1992, it had been seven years since the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had said AIDS couldn't be spread by casual contact. On a candidate questionnaire, Huckabee said it was puzzling why the "carriers of a genuine plague" had not been isolated. He also complained that too much federal money was being spent on AIDS research and suggested celebrities such as Madonna fund the research themselves.

"It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS," he wrote. "This deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of (a) true health crisis."

The Associated Press reported Huckabee's 15-year-old comments earlier this month. In response, Huckabee said it was not certain in 1992 that AIDS couldn't be spread through casual contact. As proof, he cited the case of a woman who said in 1991 that she'd been infected with the disease by her dentist.

Huckabee also denied ever calling for a quarantine, saying he never meant to "lock people up."

"I'm not going to recant or retract from the statements that I did make, because, again, the point was not saying we ought to lock people up who have HIV/AIDS," Huckabee said on Fox News Sunday.

"I had simply made the point, and I still believe this today, that in the late '80s and early '90s, when we didn't know as much as we do now about AIDS, we were acting more out of political correctness than we were about the normal public health protocols," he added.

In 1994, a year after Huckabee became lieutenant governor, he asked the Arkansas attorney general to review an AIDS-prevention course taught in a small high school in the Ozark Mountains.

Huckabee complained the 10th-grade course, called "Preventing AIDS," portrayed homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle. An assistant attorney general ruled the course did not violate Arkansas law.

Four years later, in 1998, Huckabee co-wrote a book called Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence. It was published three months after the fatal school shooting in Jonesboro, Ark. In it, he said the shootings were the result of a decaying society beset by "abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug use and homosexual activism." He also lumped homosexuality with pedophilia, sadomasochism and necrophilia as "publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations."

By contrast, in 2006, Huckabee used a somewhat innocuous joke to illustrate his support of traditional marriage to a roomful of socially conservative voters in Washington: "Until Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain saying he's changed the rules, let's keep it like it is," he said.

His comment was met with wild applause.

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