Posted on 12/11/2007 8:11:44 AM PST by dano1
The mother of Ryan White, an Indiana teenager whose life-ending battle with AIDS in the 1980s engrossed the nation, wants to meet with Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to discuss his comments 15 years ago that AIDS patients should have been isolated.
The former Arkansas governor and GOP front-runner in the important Iowa caucuses said Sunday that he stood by the comments.
That has infuriated Jeanne White-Ginder, who said: "It's so alarming to me."
In a telephone interview Monday with The Associated Press from her home in Leesburg, Fla., she said: "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."
"We have to treat this disease like a disease, and like Ryan always said, not like a dirty word," she said.
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 were sending 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."
Huckabee's aides did not immediately answer requests for comment.
As a Senate candidate in 1992, Huckabee told the AP in a questionnaire 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.
In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Huckabee 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."
Huckabee 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.
"I still believe this today," Huckabee said Sunday, that "we were acting more out of political correctness" in responding to the AIDS crisis. "I don't run from it, I don't recant it," he said of his position in 1992. Yet he said he would state his view differently in retrospect.
Huckabee outlined his views in 1992 for the AP more than a year after President George H.W. Bush, a fellow Republican, urged an audience of business executives not to fire or otherwise discriminate against employees infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
In the very early days, quarantine was seriously discussed as an option. At the very same time, the activists in San Francisco were fighting the effort to close the bathhouses.
Which of those efforts, if successful, would have killed more people?
This is one example of what lies in store should Huckabee be nominated. Hillary already has scripts in the can for ads that would be run against this “dangerous” Southern Baptist preacher. By election time, even his wife wouldn’t vote for him. The media has chosen him as the easiest GOP nominee to beat, and that’s why he is rising in the polls.
Oh, but I think we all can guess.
Thanks to these activists, not even school employees need to reveal if they have AIDS/HIV or not. But, don't let those kiddies into school without a measles vaccine! Oh, no, can't have them walking through the school doors possibly with the chicken pox or, Heaven forbid, the dreaded flu...
I think that's true. It always appears that the media praises Republicans whom the media perceive to have exploitable flaws.
This is one reason why the media is afraid to mention Duncan Hunter. I don't think he has any exploitable flaws.
Huck is being branded as we speak as either a freak or a fumbler. Either way, Hillary would destroy him. .
The Huck-o-matic is broken.
“Thanks to these activists, not even school employees need to reveal if they have AIDS/HIV or not. But, don’t let those kiddies into school without a measles vaccine! Oh, no, can’t have them walking through the school doors possibly with the chicken pox or, Heaven forbid, the dreaded flu...”
I think that if AIDS patients had been quarantined, Ryan White wouldn’t have caught the disease! He’s mom is wrong on this issue, IMO.
Spending and organization. And I like the guy.
I hope he runs for Senate to kick out Fineswine, the "Chicom import-fortune queen".
First time in history that a STD merited civil rights.
Huckabee made the quarantine statement in 1992. Most HIV myths were put to rest by then. However, if my memory serves me correctly, there was a scare that the mosquito could spread the virus around 1992.
So even folks like myself who are more sympathetic to people with AIDS wondered in the early 1990s about the spread of AIDS outside sex and blood.
First time in history that a STD merited civil rights.
If they thought it was neccessary, the media/Dems would target his ties to the defense industry and the Duke Cunningham business.
Dano can’t decide if he’s for the Huckster or against him.
My little brother died of AIDS/HIV in a hospice, Christmas, 1995 - I’ll talk to her and tell her what I think needs to be done.
I’ll assume she will not like it.
Oh, that old argument. Do you honestly believe that school students don't cut, bleed, or otherwise share bodily fluids? Chances are, the flu or the chicken pox won't kill you. AIDS ultimately leads to your death. Yet, children aren't admitted to school if they just haven't had the vaccines alone for the aforementioned viruses. But for AIDS/HIV? Not even school employees are required to say that they have it.
Bingo! The Dems are calling Huckabee the ‘glass jaw.’
As usual Huck was spouting off after listening to his Baptist buddies and not doing the research. An aggressive progam to identify and treat AIDs patients would have been a good idea but the image painted by the words quarantine and isolate is of rounding up sick people and throwing them in camps. It was a politically stupid thing to say and displayed his ignorance about how the disease was spread. Ever notice how Huck always errors on the side of coercive government?
I’m so sorry about your little brother. How was he infected?
(My whole point is that it’s hypocritical to deny children entry to school simply because they haven’t been vaccinated for viruses that most people catch and survive, at the same time that AIDS/HIV has been politicized to the point where not even a school employee has to tell the school that he/she has it.)
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