Mike Huckabee is having trouble deciding when women should be topless. His solution? Men need to cover their manboobs.
The ultra-conservative Christian and 2016 presidential hopeful started off a January radio bulletin for his broadcast, The Huckabee Report, lamenting that after 44 years, British tabloid The Sun will do away with its "famous Page 3 girls," which featured young, topless female models. Page 3 was killed in response to a "long campaign by feminists" who called them offensive and outdated, he said.
In the segment reported by Buzzfeed, Huckabee juxtaposed this with a campaign by women to allow them to "walk around shirtless, the way some men do."
"Celebrities like Chelsea Handler and Miley Cyrus have joined in, and now they’re filling the internet with topless photos of themselves, all in the name of fighting sexism and inequality," he intoned.
Last year the organization GoTopless held a parade in New York City with the message, "As long as men are allowed to be topless in public, women should have the same constitutional right. Or else, men should have to wear something to hide their chests."
Comedian Chelsea Handler last year mocked the famous image of Vladimir Putin riding a horse shirtless with her own topless version, and singer Miley Cyrus did the same, in an effort to challenge Instagram's censorship of women's breasts, Gawker reported.
The distinction between women empowering themselves to go shirtless on their own terms as opposed to being objectified for male consumers by the likes of The Sun seemed totally lost on Huckabee.
"So are topless photos of women an offensive display of sexism, or an empowering blow against sexism," he asked. "I have a feeling most men don't care much either way."
His solution? "Just tell the men to put on a darn shirt when they go out in public," he says with a chuckle.
Huckabee recently came under fire for other bizarre remarks involving female nudity. In a speech at the 2015 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, he derided legislation preventing discrimination against transgender people by saying, "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 PE. I'm pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, 'Coach, I think I'd rather shower with the girls today,'" the Des Moines Register reported.
Listen to Huckabee's broadcast below, via Buzzfeed.