Huckabee Would Have Locked Up Ryan White
I need to make one thing perfectly clear. I don't care about politics and I don't care who you vote for. Your vote is your business. I don't care what country you are in when you are reading this and don't care if you are in the left, right or middle. The only thing I ever ask is that you vote. I think you give up your right to complain of government action or inaction if you don't vote. This is NOT about the presidential election. It is a story about ignorance.
As a Senate candidate in 1992, Mike Huckabee told the AP in a questionnaire about AIDS that "we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague" if the federal government was going to deal with the spread of the disease effectively. "It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents," he said then.
OK, so he was an idiot back in 1992 running in a conservative state. I think it was a moronic statement and still do. Huckabee tried to backtrack a bunch this weekend on FOX News and denied that those words were a call to quarantine the AIDS population, although he did not explain how else isolation would be achieved. "I didn't say we should quarantine," he said. The idea was not to "lock people up."
I guess his idea would have been to find some nice quiet island someplace for people with AIDS to live and die quietly and as more people became ill they would be sent to the island to replace those who had died. People like Ryan White would be shipped off to the island as well. Oh, and probably his mother also. Why would his mother go you ask? Well, because to this very day, Mike Huckabee is not 100% certain that AIDS is not caused by casual contact.
On FOX News on Sunday he acknowledged the prevailing scientific view then, and since, that the virus that causes AIDS is not spread through casual contact, but said that was not certain. To this day. As of Sunday, if you have AIDS and stay in close proximity to Mike Huckabee he is not 100% certain that he isn't going to catch AIDS from you. In his world then in 1992, Ryan White would have gone to the island and because his mother was in close contact, would have to go as well.
Naturally, Ryan's mom wasn't happy about what the former Governor had to say.
"It's so alarming to me," she said in a telephone interview Monday with The Associated Press from her home in Leesburg, Fla.
"It's very important to me that we don't live in the darkness" when people thought AIDS was transmitted through casual contact, such as by "kissing, tears, sweat and saliva," White-Ginder said. "We have to treat this disease like a disease, and like Ryan always said, not like a dirty word."
White was 13 when he was diagnosed with AIDS in December 1984, having contracted the disease from the blood-clotting agent used to treat his hemophilia. He was barred from school the following year out of fear the disease was spread casually. He died in 1990 at age 18.
On Tuesday, the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, and the AIDS Institute sent a letter to Huckabee asking him to meet with White-Ginder — who declined in the interview to say what political party she belongs to — and calling his comments "completely beyond comprehension."
In the year 2007, a presidential candidate for the most powerful country in the world thinks that if he sits next to Magic Johnson he might get AIDS. Nice.
