On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Gov. Mike Huckabee, the ordained Baptist preacher, claimed his record in office proves that he has not allowed his religion to influence the way he governs:

“Acts of God” had a long history in English maritime law and was standard language in many insurance policies.

Never would I want to use the government institutions to impose my or anybody else’s faith or to restrict…

If people want to know how I would blend these issues, the best way to look at it is how I served as a governor. I didn’t ever propose a bill that we would remove the Capitol dome of Arkansas and replace it with a steeple. You know, we didn’t do tent revivals on the grounds of the Capitol. But my faith is important to me.

While it’s true he didn’t deface the state capitol or hold tent revivals on public property, he did allow his faith to interfere with his governing in a way that could have had serious consequences.

In March 1997, after a tornado ripped through Arkadelphia killing six people and destroying over 70 businesses downtown, Gov. Huckabee held up disaster funding for weeks because he objected to the insurance industry’s term for destruction-by-tornado: “act of God”:

Senate Bill 491 was so straightforward it ran to only two pages. It sought to protect tornado victims from insurance companies that might cancel policies after they filed claims. “No insurance policy or contract covering damages to property shall be canceled nor the renewal thereof denied solely as a result of claims arising from acts of God,” it read.

“Acts of God” had a long history in English maritime law and was standard language in many insurance policies…

According to state legislative records, Huckabee first registered his objection to the Senate bill five days after the tornado. But his staff did not relay his concerns, he later wrote.

“While I realize that to some this is a minor issue, it is a matter of deep conscience with me to attribute in law a destructive and deadly force as being an ‘act of God,’ ” he eventually wrote to the bill’s sponsors, [state Rep. Dennis R.] Young and Sen. Wayne Dowd. While acknowledging that “acts of God” was the “appropriate” legal term, he suggested the legislature substitute “natural disaster.”

While Arkadelphia stood in ruins, Huckabee’s dithering over semantics angered legislators in both parties. What is tornado damage compared with horrendous woes God visited upon Job? his co-religionists asked. The Texarkana newspaper suggested in an editorial that the governor should “sacrifice a bit of his personal theology for the greater public good. That would be an act of God.”

One of the sponsors of the bill described Huckabee in a single word:

“‘Petty’ is the best word to describe him,” said Dennis R. Young, a state representative at the time who sponsored the relief measure and had been an early Huckabee supporter. “In these kinds of things, he’d make mountains out of molehills.”

Amazingly, Huckabee won this argument. After five alternative phrases for “acts of God” were rejected, the governor and the legislature came to terms on the phrase “natural causes.”

On April 4, three weeks after the town was nearly wiped off the map, Huckabee finally released the disaster relief funds.

This is a smaller-scale version of the Bush administration’s “gone fishin’” response to Hurricane Katrina. This country can’t afford four more years of this sort of dim-witted leadership. Thank God he doesn’t have a chance.