WASHINGTON – Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) compared abortion to slavery at an anti-abortion fundraiser, according to the University of Tennessee's Daily Beacon.
Huckabee, a top contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, said abortion shouldn't be a states rights issue, as that would be like making slavery a states rights issue.
"It was wrong to own a slave in Mississippi and Michigan," Huckabee said, as quoted by the student newspaper Daily Beacon. "This is not a states issue."
Giving the keynote speech at a Knoxville Convention Center event organized by the anti-abortion Center for Bioethical Reform, Huckabee called abortion a moral issue that's "not about left and right" but "about right and wrong."
Tennessee news station WBIR reported that outside the Monday dinner, protesters rallied against the Center for Bioethical Reform, which is "known for posting images of aborted fetuses on the UT campus as part of its anti-abortion campaign."
Huckabee is considered to be one of the GOP's top three contenders to lead the 2012 Republican ticket for the presidency, sharing the stage with former governors Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin in numerous polls.
"For me this is an issue that I've said before, transcends all of the political issues. I often said I would gladly lose an election before I would ever yield on the issue of the sanctity of human life," Huckabee told the crowd.
Huckabee is especially popular with Republican voters who rank religious and social issues as their top priorities.
He has made a similar comparison before. At a 2009 fundraiser, Huckabee said allowing abortion would be like telling the younger generation that "it is perfectly OK for one person to own another human being."
"I thought we dealt with that 150 years ago when the issue of slavery was finally settled in this country, and we decided that it no longer was a political issue, it wasn't an issue of geography, it was an issue of morality," he said, according to The Associated Press.
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