What the (rhymes with "duck"), Huck?

A was going to do a "principles are hot" post about Natalie Portman severing her relationship with Dior following John Galliano's anti-semitic rant earlier this week - and I admire the hell out of her for taking a stand that way - but events, and Mike Huckabee's mouth, overtook me.

On Michael Medved's radio show the day after Portman won an Academy Award for Best Actress, Huckabee held her up as an example of Hollywood corrupting America's wholesome family values by setting a bad example (or something). Frankly, I'm not sure what he was going for. Let's figure it out together:

“People see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts, ‘we’re not married but we’re having these children and they’re doing just fine,’” Mr. Huckabee told the conservative radio host Michael Medved on Monday. “I think it gives a distorted image. It’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out-of-wedlock children.”

Hmmm... Here we have an example of someone staking a position on something other than facts. Or BS, if you want to think of it that way. In my job, when I prep people for media interviews, I stress that you should never veer off into areas that you don't know by heart, documentation included. If you start basing opinions on something you vaguely recall that you heard somewhere, then you risk looking like an idiot.

For instance, I don't think anyone could describe Portman as "boasting" about being a single mother. She and the baby's father seem to have gotten engaged as soon as they learned they were pregnant. Also, Portman's my age. Even if she weren't a highly paid film actor with a bachelor's degree fron an Ivy League school, most people our age are at the point where they can support a kid. The single mothers Huckabee talks about who find themselves limited in their education and work opportunities are typically younger. And, if one's going to pull out a prominent example of a young woman who got pregnant, say, in high school, and who's parlayed her notoriety into appearances on national magazines and reality TV shows, which probably reach a lot more impressionable young women than an R-rated art house film... I think that would not be Natalie Portman.

But there's a bigger problem with what Huckabee said that has nothing to do with an actor. More than one of them, actually. Let's start with this myth that no one had sex pre-marriage before the sexual revolution, when the awful feminists forced women to burn their underwear (or something). Not true. There's more than one person in my family who was born far less than nine months after their parents' wedding. (In the 50s.)There's also the memorable example of a relative born in the early 20th century more than a year after her "father" died. So don't blame sex on Hollywood.

But what's more troubling is his implication that unplanned pregnancies are all on the mother. Oh, those silly girls, going out and getting ideas from movie magazines and then running on down to the Knocked Up Store so they can be trendy and raise babies off the government. No men were involved in the making of this pregnancy.

And then there's real WTF. Let's let Huckabee explain:

My comments were about the statistical reality that most single moms are very poor, undereducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death. That’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that society often glorifies and glamorizes the idea of having children out of wedlock.

If that reality is something that keeps Huckabee up at night, really and truly, then there are things he can do besides throwing up his hands and saying "Single mothers, whaddya do?" For starters, he could rethink his support of abstinence-only sex ed programs, which he supported as Arkansas' governor and as a 2008 presidential candidate. He could've eliminated the waiting period for abortions in his home state. (In 2008, Huckabee said he favored a Constitutional amendment banning abortion.) He could encourage other states and the federal government to promote healthy living as he did as governor. He could support raising the amount of Pell grants and other aid that make it possible for low-income people to attend college. He might consider supporting tax deductions for child care expenses. He would certainly prevail on his fellow Republicans to stop targeting safety net programs like the one that provides birth control and pap smears to low-income women.

But that might actually require effort, as opposed to casting judgment on people he doesn't know.