On Valentine's Day 2005, Mike Huckabee and his wife, Janet, were married all over again. Then governor of Arkansas, Huckabee hoped the super-public ceremony - which took place in an arena full of more than 6,000 people - would spark a wave of covenant marriages, legal contracts available in only three states that commit couples to counseling and a two-year waiting period before divorce.

At one point during the ceremony, a whistle sounded and about two dozen protesters stood up, according to The New York Times. They unfurled a banner: "Queer equality now."

Huckabee ignored them, the Times reported, and went on with the ceremony.

Arkansans who watched Huckabee during his 10½-year tenure said that gesture was emblematic of his approach to gay-rights issues: He paid them little mind unless pressed. But his stances have attracted attention recently after a report that Huckabee advocated isolating AIDS patients in 1992.

Observers said Huckabee's positions on gay rights fell in line with those of most social conservatives: He supported a constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and he opposed allowing gays to become foster parents. But, they said, Huckabee didn't make those issues priorities, focusing instead on issues such as education and health care.

"He may well be a mean-spirited, gay-bashing Christian evangelical in his heart of hearts," said Janine Parry, who teaches Arkansas politics at the University of Arkansas, "but it's not how he governed. He didn't use the bully pulpit to bully gays and lesbians. He could have, but he didn't."

As a U.S. Senate candidate in 1992, Huckabee wrote in an Associated Press questionnaire that homosexuality was an "aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle" that posed "a dangerous public health risk." Huckabee has since said he won't run from the statement but would express it differently today.

A comment he made in a meeting with Monitor editors in August 2006 has also drawn scrutiny. As Huckabee has risen from an asterisk to leading the polls in Iowa, the news media - and his opponents - have seized on his suggestion then that he supported state-level civil unions.

"I would tend to leave (the question of civil unions) to the state, as long as they wanted to not call it a marriage," Huckabee said in 2006. "Now if they'd call it a marriage, then I'd have a problem with it."

When he returned to the Monitor this month, he was asked to clarify his position.

"I've never supported civil unions, and I don't," Huckabee said. "I don't know, honestly, how I said what I said (in 2006) other than, 'Hey, that's something New Hampshire has to deal with.' "

Huckabee said civil unions are a "precursor to same-sex marriage." In some ways, he said, they're the same because to dissolve one, a couple would essentially divorce. Huckabee added he's not familiar with the specifics of New Hampshire's law, because he's never "been interested in a civil union myself."

That last comment is characteristic of the way Huckabee spoke about gay-rights issues during his time as governor, liberal observers said. Rita Sklar, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, said Huckabee's rhetoric was often "extremely unpleasant or sarcastic."

"He is hardly ever outright nasty," Sklar said. "But he is suggestively nasty."

In 1997, six months after Huckabee became governor, the Arkansas legislature passed a law banning same-sex marriage. Huckabee supported it and put forth an amendment that said Arkansas should prohibit sodomy to protect the traditional family structure.

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