Left: Huckabee family several years ago, Mike and Janet Huckabee more recently

The New Yorker has profile of Mike Huckabee up that explores the possibility that he may be the Republicans’ “best hope” to take on Pres. Obama in 2012. If he is, there’s at least one quote from the interview on social issues that will likely turn off reasonable independent voters (and any of the few remaining Republicans who are rational) down the road:

I asked him to explain his rationale for opposing gay rights. “I do believe that God created male and female and intended for marriage to be the relationship of the two opposite sexes,” he said. “Male and female are biologically compatible to have a relationship. We can get into the ick factor, but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically, that doesn’t work the same.” [Emphasis added.]

“Ick” is in the mind of the beholder. For example — and with apologies in advance if you are eating as you read this, dear reader — but imagine just for a second, Huckabee and his wife Janet belly to belly making the beast with two backs, doing the nasty and hiding the salami — fill in your own euphemism, just so long as your imaginary Huckabees are doing it missionary style.

See? Ick. Who wants to think of these two bruisers having sex? No one. And yet, Mike Huckabee — a supposedly serious Republican candidate for president in 2012 — rests the foundation of his justification for the use of constitutional amendments in 45 states and federal laws like the Defense of Marriage Act to restrict millions of Americans’ civil right to marry a picture in his puerile mind of what these people do in bed.

Focusing the power of the human imagination onto the mechanics of other people engaging in sexual intercourse is an activity that normal, well-adjusted people leave behind after adolescence, usually after they have experienced them sufficiently in their own lives so that they lose their intrigue. However, it’s largely this ick factor — usually wrapped in Scriptures and/or spurious psychology — that has underpinned the opposition to gay rights movement over its 60-year history.

But at least Huckabee was being honest for a moment during the New Yorker interview. When pressed to expand his views on gay marriage, Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher, started lying:

I asked him if he had any arguments that didn’t have to do with God or ickiness. “There are some pretty startling studies that show if you want to end poverty it’s not education and race, it’s monogamous marriage,” he said. “Many studies show that children who grow up in a healthy environment where they have both a mother and a father figure have both a healthier outlook and a different perspective from kids who don’t have the presence of both.”

In fact, a 25-year study recently published by the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that children brought up by lesbians were better adjusted than their peers. And, of course, nobody has been able to study how kids fare with married gay parents. “You know why?” Huckabee said. “Because no culture in the history of mankind has ever tried to redefine marriage.”

But in the Old Testament polygamy was commonplace. The early Christians considered marriage an arrangement for those without the self-discipline to live in chastity, as Christ did. Marriage was not deemed a sacrament by the Church until the twelfth century. And, before 1967, marriage was defined in much of the United States as a relationship between a man and a woman of the same race.

Regardless of the past, wouldn’t Huckabee be curious to know whether allowing gay people to marry had a positive or negative effect on children and society?

“No, not really. Why would I be?” he said, and laughed.

In appearance on Fox News’ Sunday show this weekend, host Chris Wallace gave Huckabee an opportunity to explain why the “ick factor” is sufficient cause to restrict gay rights:

“That term comes from a gay magazine called The Edge in which the author, Joseph Erbentraut, interviewed professor Martha Nussbaum from — one of Barack Obama’s colleagues [from] The University of Chicago. She uses a term ‘projected disgust.’ He, in the interview, coined this phrase. It’s in the article that he wrote. It’s in the interview with her. That phrase was not mine. It is actually a phrase that exists within the gay community. But somehow it is okay if they talk about it but if someone else talks about it, it is off bounds,” explained Huckabee.

Here Huckabee is being disingenuous. Professor Nussbaum coined the term “ick factor” not to justify it as a rationale for suppressing gay rights but rather to explain how hateful, soulless pols like Huckabee exploit homophobia to gin up votes. She sees the ick factor, as deployed by Huckabee and others, as part of a continuum.

“I think [disgust] plays a part in lots of arguments against same-sex marriage,” Nussbaum said in the Edge Boston interview, “those that use the idea that straight marriage will be ’defiled’ or ’tainted’ by the approval of gay marriage. All societies known to us have subordinated some group or groups of people by ascribing disgusting properties to them. This is a key feature of misogyny, of anti-Semitism, of historical Indian caste prejudice, of American racism and so forth.”

Mike Huckabee has his own ick factor to deal with if he really wants to become president — and it has nothing to do with his and his family’s superficial unattractiveness. His ick factor is that he is a bigot, plain and simple.

Taken as a whole, polls on Americans’ views of gay issues over the past decades show a definite trend toward acceptance or, at least, tolerance, including a remarkable Gallup poll released this month that found for the first time a majority of Americans — 54 percent, up from 40 percent just 10 years ago — view being gay as “morally acceptable.”