Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee seemingly endorsed "biblical" slavery over the modern prison system on Wednesday's edition of "Mickelson in the Morning," ThinkProgress' Scott Keyes reports.
In Huckabee's defense, host Jan Mickelson was firing ideas at the long-shot for the GOP candidacy, and many of those ideas were couched in familiar biblical phrases that would incline Huckabee to agree with them content-be-damned, so it's entirely possible that he simply didn't understand what he was endorsing.
Mickelson argued that "the criminal justice system has been taken over by progressives," and that only way to counter their pernicious influence on it is to return to biblical principles, such as those outlined in Exodus. "It says, if a person steals, they have to pay it back two-fold, four-fold," Mickelson said.
"If they don't have anything, we're supposed to take them down and sell them," he added. "We indenture them and they have to spend their time not sitting on their stump in a jail cell, they’re supposed to be working off the debt -- wouldn't that be a better choice?"
Huckabee responded immediately, but in much the same way that an undergraduate does when called out by a teacher for not paying attention. "Well, it really would be," he said, betraying no real understanding of what the antecedent of "it" was.
"Sometimes the best way to deal with a nonviolent criminal behavior is what you just suggested" -- which was, of course, biblical slavery.
Listen to the entire conversation below via ThinkProgress.