Mike Huckabee—former Arkansas governor, pastor, potential Presidential candidate, and card-carrying Old White Man—has a lot of thoughts to share in his upcoming book, God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy. As US News discovered within the pages of what one assumes was an early press copy of the tome, some of these thoughts are about Beyoncé. More specifically, those thoughts are that Beyoncé—an incredibly wealthy, talented, adored global superstar and modern feminist heroine—is being pimped out by her husband, Jay Z. Sorry, what?Huckabee assumes that, because Mrs. Knowles-Carter chooses to use "explicit dance moves" during her (sold-out) stadium tours, she is being exploited by her life partner and frequent collaborator (whom she married years after she arose to superstardom, and who has vocally and publicly voiced his support and admiration for his wife on many, many occasions). It never seems to occur to ol' Mike that a woman could possibly be making these choices for herself—let alone a black woman, and let alone a black woman who is a wife and mother. Why would a woman ever choose to dance provocatively onstage or to publicly own her sexuality in a way that inspires literal millions? It MUST have been her rapper thug husband forcing her to do it! Clearly, that's the only logical explanation, thinks Mike Huckabee.See, Huckabee had seen her (triumphant, ground-breaking) performance of her hit song "Drunk in Love" at last year's Grammys, and this had made him sad. Huckabee thought to himself (and then somehow thought it a reasonable move to write down for public consumption) that, "Beyoncé is incredibly talented—gifted, in fact. She has an exceptional set of pipes and can actually sing. She is a terrific dancer—without the explicit moves best left for the privacy of her bedroom. Jay Z is a very shrewd businessman, but I wonder: Does it occur to him that he is arguably crossing the line from husband to pimp by exploiting his wife as a sex object?"What a nice backhanded compliment! Does it occur to Mike Huckabee that A. nobody asked him, and more importantly, B. Beyoncé does not and will never give a fuck what this shriveled old relic thinks of her, her husband, or her performances, because despite what Huckabee obviously thinks, she is a whip-smart, self-sufficient, independent black woman with zero time for his sexist mumbling? Does it occur to him that women are not objects? Sadly, it doesn't.Friendly reminder, this is a man with a thinly veiled aim to run for President of the United States in 2016—a man to whom it had apparently never occurred that women could be able to make decisions for themselves. Great.Kim Kelly is repping Mary Wollstonecraft on Twitter.
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