Attempting to show former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) as a religious illiterate who doesn't understand Judaism, MSNBC host Alex Wagner this afternoon seems to have betrayed her lack of understanding about kosher dietary restrictions and what it takes to make a kosher deli kosher.
During a segment on 2016 Republican presidential hopefuls, the Now host played a clip of the former Baptist preacher from a CNN interview equating his refusal to "evolve" on biblically-informed view of same-sex marriage with how it would be repugnant to require an observant Jew to toss aside his or her convictions to "serve bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli."
Wagner, thinking she caught Huckabee in the midst of a comical error, quipped:
Side note: Carnegie Deli offers a shrimp salad sandwich to which you can add bacon as a side.
That's all well and good, and I'm sure the Carnegie Deli -- only 0.6 miles from 30 Rockefeller Plaza -- is a favored lunch spot for MSNBC employees in Manhattan, but it most certainly is NOT a kosher establishment, even though it serves up sandwiches made with kosher meats.
Of course, Carnegie Deli has every right to serve non-kosher foods and to not seek kosher certification from a recognized rabbinical authority. Huckabee's point, however, was that just as kosher-keeping Jewish restaurateurs would be aghast at being pressured to break their faith's dietary laws in order to run a business, so Christians should be offended by drumbeat of pressure society places on them to drop their deeply-held biblically-informed convictions on marriage in order to be seen as "tolerant" and not "offensive."
But why let a little intellectual honesty get in the way of a flippant, factually-devoid putdown? This is, after all, MSNBC.
