Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has yet to make any public comments about Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender Olympic gold medalist. But some in the news and entertainment media have attempted to use a joke he told in February to decipher what his feelings about Jenner might be.
“Apparently, Caitlyn Jenner is a Republican,” wrote CNN’s Sally Kohn on Wednesday, referring to Jenner’s declared political party affiliation. “But maybe not for long, especially if Mike Huckabee keeps opening his mouth.”
“For most people, Huckabee’s comments seem a little out of date, perhaps even bigoted,” wrote Washington Post politics writer Janell Ross on Tuesday. “This is a country in which a gold-medal-winning Olympian and one-time mascot of American masculinity just revealed that he is a transgender Republican, and then posed for the cover of Vanity Fair to share a new name, Caitlyn Jenner, along with a new gender identity and personal story.”
Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton wrote that Huckabee “is clearly not a Caitlyn Jenner supporter.”
Bonnie Fuller, another celebrity blogger, wrote at her online tabloid Hollywood Life that Huckabee should “stop hating on Caitlyn Jenner, now!”
“There was an overwhelming response of positivity and support [for Jenner], minus a few hiccups here and there, and then there’s good ole Mike Huckabee,” wrote E! Online, the massive entertainment news website.
Huckabee’s newly controversial joke was made at a religions convention in Nashville, Tenn., in February.
While discussing controversial local-level policies granting transgender people rights to use public restrooms of their preference — a man who claims to identify as a woman could use the female restroom, for example — Huckabee said, “Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in P.E.”
The joke came two months before ABC aired an interview in which Jenner officially came out as transgender and four months before Jenner posed on the front of Vanity Fair, to much support from the news media. It was resurfaced, however, by the right-leaning website World Net Daily and popularized by the website BuzzFeed.
Huckabee on Wednesday declined to discuss his joke.
“What people talk to me about is not some speech I made four months ago, and it’s not some cultural issue,” Huckabee he said before a fundraiser in Little Rock, Ark., according to the Associated Press. “People talk to me about the loss of their job, they talk to me about the threats to this country, and that’s what I’m focused on. It’s why I’m running for president. It’s not to entertain the masses with comments on the culture news of the day.”
