Huckabee speaks at TRBC with McCain's fellow POWs

Mike Huckabee, John McCain’s opponent earlier this year for the Republican presidential nomination, urged people at Thomas Road Baptist Church on Sunday to vote with their values concerning abortion, marriage and a low-tax economy.

Pastor Jonathan Falwell introduced Huckabee, along with three of McCain’s fellow prisoners of war in Vietnam. He called them his friends, in keeping with the church’s “bring a friend” theme.

“I feel a little out of place as one of Jonathan’s friends today because I’m the only guy that wasn’t in jail with John McCain,” Huckabee said, drawing laughter.

It was the only time Huckabee mentioned McCain during his 4½-minute talk to about 6,000 worshipers at the 11 a.m. service.

Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister, talked mostly about how morality relates to government.

“If somebody says you shouldn’t talk about morality because that has nothing to do with politics, let me assure you, from a standpoint of having been a governor, that every time we have moral incapacity we have to increase the capacity of government,” Huckabee said.

That bigger government means more police officers, more prisons and more government employees in jobs such as cleaning graffiti off buildings, Huckabee said.

“The size and cost of government is directly proportional to what we do personally in our own behavior in not living up to that simple standard of Jesus, ‘Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you,’” Huckabee said.

Elections relate to pocketbooks because of big government, Huckabee said.

“I’d like to see you have enough, before the government reaches deep into your pocket, to give to things like Thomas Road Baptist Church,” Huckabee said.

Falwell followed Huckabee’s comments by urging everyone to vote, saying U.S. servicemen and women have fought and died so Americans can have free elections.

Falwell urged worshipers to inform themselves about the candidates’ positions on issues and “vote for the person that most closely reflects what we believe.”

And when the election is over, Christians have a duty to pray for the winner, Falwell said.

“Regardless of who that next leader is, whether it is John McCain or whether it is Barack Obama, we as Christians have an absolute duty and responsibility to pray for that person every single day because they will be our leader,” Falwell said.

The nation has seen “despicable acts” during the campaign, including vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin burned in effigy in Hollywood and Obama burned in effigy in Kentucky, Falwell said.

“We need to understand that we are a civil nation and we have agreed to disagree,” and “we do not have the right” to demean others, Falwell said.

The former prisoners of war, who rode into Lynchburg with Huckabee on a bus painted with the Republican campaign theme “Victory 2008,” were American jet pilots who were shot down on separate missions over North Vietnam.

They were Thomas Moe, an Air Force pilot, Orson Swindle, a Marine pilot, and Paul Galanti, a Navy flier like McCain.

As Falwell described it, all of them became “John McCain’s cellmates” in a Hanoi prison.

Huckabee said in an interview after the church service that he’s happy to campaign on behalf of the man he ran against in the primary elections because he regards McCain as a man of honor.

His TV talk show, “Huckabee,” airs Saturdays and Sundays at 8 pm. on the Fox News channel.