Huckabee Revisits Gay Adoption Debate with Rosie O'Donnell
One week after debating the issue of gay adoption with talk show host Rosie O'Donnell, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee sat down with fellow conservative Sean Hannity to comment on the contentious yet "respectful" debate, boiling down his point into a single statement.
"Personally, I don't think it (gay adoption)'s the ideal," Huckabee told Hannity on Friday.
"I know people will say, well, we don't have the ideal. But still, kids need both the mother and father role models in their life," he added.
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On Apr. 22, Huckabee had appeared on O'Donnell's radio show after the prominent lesbian comedian caught wind of the former governor's highly publicized interview with a college journalist in New Jersey two week earlier.
During the interview with the young man, who Huckabee said was "actually more of an activist than a journalist," the former governor acknowledged his support for Arkansas' recently overturned ban on gay adoptions, saying that "now is not the time to see if we can experiment and find out 'How does this work?'"
"Children," Huckabee said, "are not puppies."
"I think this is not about trying to create statements for people who want to change the basic fundamental definitions of family. And always we should act in the best interest of the children, not in the seeming interest of the adults," he stated.
After Huckabee's comments lit up the blogosphere and was picked up by mainstream media, O'Donnell invited the ordained Baptist minister to her show, where the two revisited the issue of gay adoption.
Over the course of the interview, O'Donnell asked multiple times whether or not a person's sexuality should be a qualification for adopting a child.
"Is that the only gauge you think to make a good parent is whether or not their straight?" O'Donnell asked.
Despite several rephrasings of the question, Huckabee avoided giving a direct answer, at best saying it was up to the states.
When asked again by Hannity whether he is against gay adoption, Huckabee said only that he doesn't think it's the ideal though he also said he has "no doubt" that O'Donnell loves her adopted children and that she has the best intentions for them.
"It's not a personal thing. This is not a big issue for me. I don't go around making this an issue. It's not something that is high on my priority list to talk about," the former governer stated.
In agreeing with Huckabee's comment on "the ideal," Hannity added, "I think there are certain things that fathers offer their children that mothers naturally don't. And the things that mother offer children. I think there's a difference."
Both Hannity and Huckabee host their own TV programs on the Fox News Channel.
