Early n 2015, former Arkansas governor and 2016 Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee made a flawed yet remarkably revealing statement about gay marriage and his support for businesses that discriminate against gay couples.

"This is not just a political issue. It is a biblical issue. And as a biblical issue -- unless I get a new version of the scriptures, it's really not my place to say, OK, I'm just going to evolve.

"It's like asking someone who's Jewish to start serving bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli. We don't want to do that -- I mean, we're not going to do that. Or like asking a Muslim to serve up something that is offensive to him, or to have dogs in his backyard. We're so sensitive to make sure we don't offend certain religions, but then we act like Christians can't have the convictions that they've had for 2,000 years."

This statement is wrong on so many levels that I could write an entire book and not cover them all; so I’ll just deal with the most glaring error.

At the time Huckabee said this, news outlets had been covering stories of bakers and florists turning away gay customers seeking services for their weddings, and for-profit wedding chapels refusing to marry gays. Huckabee wants us to equate the laws protecting gays in these situations to forcing Jews to “serve bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli.”

Here’s the glaring flaw: in the places where laws protect gays from hateful  discrimination, no one's forcing businesses to sell anything - they're not being told which products or services they must offer to the public. Instead, these laws make sure those businesses can't choose willy-nilly who they sell to. Instead of the "bacon-wrapped shrimp" analogy, a better comparison would be a law punishing Jewish grocers who refuse to sell gefilte fish to non-Jews and, for most people, that law would be just fine. A baker who believes chocolate is poisonous doesn't have to sell chocolate cakes - even if people ask for them; but that same baker is breaking the law if he or she won't sell a vanilla cake to a the guy who walks into the shop munching on a chocolate bar.

Now that we’ve seen how badly Huckabee’s argument misses its target, let’s look at just how amazingly right it is - and just how that “rightness” shows the hypocrisy of “Bible-believing” Christians and blasts a huge hole their argument against gay marriage.

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