Mike Huckabee's record on freeing violent criminals because Jesus told him to is worse than we knew

Gene Lyons:

During the former Baptist minister's decade as Arkansas governor, it appeared that no matter how heinous an inmate's crimes, all he had to do for a pardon was drop to his knees, praise Jesus and persuade some preacher known to Huckabee of his newfound holiness. "Everybody knows that Mike Huckabee makes up his mind what to do by what God tells him to do," said one minister who gained clemency for a prisoner serving 100 years for the strong-arm robbery of elderly neighbors.

Making the governor's personal acquaintance also seemed to help. Inmates competed to be assigned to do yard work at the Governor's Mansion. "If you do a good job raking the governor's leaves," Pulaski County (Little Rock) prosecutor Larry Jegley complained bitterly, "you can go free."

Altogether, Huckabee commuted 163 inmates' sentences, including a dozen murderers. Several have already ended up back in prison. Indeed, given Huckabee's track record, Maurice Clemmons probably won't be the last to earn notoriety. We must pray that he ends up being the worst. Only a strong public outcry in 2004 prevented the governor from freeing a Lonoke County killer who'd beaten, raped and run over a pregnant woman with his car, only to get religion in the penitentiary.

Look, there are those people who can only control their behavior when they have a religious framework within which to work. I don't understand needing a great white alpha male in the sky ready to smite you in order to behave because I don't need one, I can do it on my own. But hey -- whatever it takes. However, as I noted on Tuesday, deeds rather than faith ought to be the benchmark of whether someone has truly repented. And where Mike Huckabee is concerned, it's all about the professions of faith rather than tha actions of faith. But isn't this a logical outcome of a theology which states that nothing you do actually DO counts, it's all about whether you choose to believe a story? Isn't it only a matter of degree of heinousness that takes you on the road from being Mark Sanford to being Maurice Clemmons? Once you decide that it's about faith not deeds, isn't it one long continuum of amorality and criminality? And that's if you want to buy (as Huck did) that Clemmons' "conversion" was real, and not something being more a function of getting off on the old ultraviolence and tolchocking and getting to bed with one's wives' handmaidens, as Alex in A Clockwork Orange does.

How does one reconcile someone like Mike Huckabee, who's a rabid fetophile, wanting to free someone who beat, raped, and ran over a pregnant woman with his car? What about THAT fetus? Or does a man's conversion take priority over even a fetus?