Former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee–the same guy who said providing birth control under the Affordable Care Act insults women by “making them believe they’re helpless…because they cannot control their libido or reproductive system without the help of the government“–has caught the attention of an audience quite unfamiliar to him: fans of Beyoncé.
Huckabee decided to dish out some unsolicited parenting tips while discussing his new book with People magazine. Specifically, he wanted to make it clear that he considers the Obamas to be unsuitable parents because they allow their teenage daughters to listen to Beyoncé.
I don’t understand how on one hand they can be such doting parents and so careful about the intake of everything – how much broccoli they eat and where they go to school … and yet they don’t see anything that might not be suitable [in the lyrics and Beyoncé choreography] best left for the privacy of her bedroom.
Under this logic, Huckabee has qualms with the way that parents have raised more than 67 million people (or 22 times the population of the state that elected him to be governor).
Considering Huckabee’s past, which includes mysteriously destroying computer hard drives right before he left office, orchestrating the anti-LGBT Chick-fil-A counter-protests, and standing by Todd Akin after his infamous “ways to try to shut that whole thing down” comment regarding pregnancy after rape, it seems the former governor is a bit hypocritical to be accusing someone else of “mental poison” on any scale.
Luckily, teenage girls, including the daughters of the Obamas, have developed the concept known as “critical thinking,” and are able to successfully assess the world around them without mimicking it. And even in the event that Sasha and Malia decided to replicate Beyoncé, much of that replication would do the world a lot of good.
The Obamas have stated how good of a role model Beyoncé is for their daughters. It’s possible to be sexy and still embody modern-day feminism, as Beyoncé does. Men, like Huckabee, who live in patriarchal societies like ours may find it hard to accept when women know they’re valuable. She’s able to say that girls run the world, and she has her own empire standing behind her as she says it.
Listen, Mike: we get it. Between dropping an entire album without anyone from her team leaking information about it, to topping lists by Forbes, the Guardian, Time, Billboard, the Guinness Book of World Records, and many others, the fact that Beyoncé is more popular than you can be hard to accept.
But someone needs to tell Huckabee that saying the Queen B is anything other than flawless is pretty much a factual error.
