I wanted to follow up on a question you and the other candidates got at the YouTube debate about whether you believe every word in the Bible. Do you believe the Bible is inerrant?
I believe it is. There are some things in the Bible that were clearly intended to be figurative: "If the eye offends thee, go pluck it out." Did Jesus mean that we were supposed to take our fingertips, reach deep into our eye and pull it out if we see something we don't think we should see? Obviously not. "Inerrant" means if you follow the direction of the Bible, it will not lead you into error.

Do you think scriptural revelations from God stopped when the Bible was completed?
I don't have any evidence or indication that he's handed us a new book to add to the ones, the 66, that were canonized in 325 A.D.

How did your faith play a role in dealing with pardons and commutations? You've said that you have to wear two different hats, but your faith must play some role, right?
It does. It doesn't mean that I am soft, and that everybody who has a hard-luck story, I'm just going to turn them loose. [But] I truly tried to look at every case, without regard to the respective person. If there were injustices, I tried to do everything I could to correct them, and for example, there were issues where I felt like African-American males were given harsher sentences, especially for drug crimes, than were upper-middle-class white kids who were arrested for the same thing. My faith affected me there because I don't think you should have two standards of justice—one where upper-middle-class white kids whose fathers can get them an attorney get to go to rehab with no criminal record, and [another where] a poor black kid from a single-parent home gets eight to 10 in the Arkansas Department of Corrections. Now, did my faith affect that? I sure hope so. I'd like to think a person without faith would like to see justice equally meted out.

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