Many of us who have been watching Mike Huckabee for a while have let ourselves be a little bit charmed by his underdog status and his political skills. But there’s pretty good evidence that he is in fact a nasty, ignorant man:
Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could “pose a dangerous public health risk.”
As a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 1992, Huckabee answered 229 questions submitted to him by The Associated Press. Besides a quarantine, Huckabee suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies.
“If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague,” Huckabee wrote.
Via NRO’s Jonathan Adler. The National Review has been a key organ in the economic royalists’ civil war against the theocrats. And Adler’s comment illustrates that Huckabee’s statement was grotesque even for the party of Reagan, not known for its enlightened AIDS policy:
Assuming the survey response excerpts reported by the AP are representative, and not taken out of a mitigating context, this is a pretty outrageous position for Huckabee to have held at the time. This was not the early 1980s, when the threat posed by the HIV virus was poorly understood. Rather it was 1992, long after it was understood that AIDS could not be transmitted through casual contact. So either Huckabee was woefully ignorant about the nature of AIDS, or he supported a quarantine despite the lack of a threat of communicability. Neither interpretation speaks well of him.
The quarantine suggestion is disgusting. And yet I think I’m even more offended by his contemptuous dismissal of the AIDS crisis as something for those nuts in Hollywood to deal with.
Kinda undermines the persuasiveness of the Huckster’s Christian act, doesn’t it?
7 Responses to “Huckabee Wanted AIDS Quarantine in 1992”
He and others are still living in the dark age. What’s really funny is that they’ve been in positions of prominence and power for years and yet they’ve been unaffected and uneducated by what’s been going on in civilization. They’ve obviously never thought of any of it. It speaks loads about what kind of men we’ve been electing. That’s the American voters’ fault. These are our leaders!! They’ve been selling us a load of stupid for ages and we’ve been paying top dollar for it.
my god, 15 years ago, yet the left must smear. it must. it knows no other politics except character assassination. this is because liberalism is collapsing all over the world, from here to france and back again. only when arch-liberals admit to their socialist desires to they take over, like chavez and castro, two true liberals who are the mold that obama and clinton seek to aspire to. a sly politician from hope, i guess the left should worry.
Uh oh. matt’s back with a vengeance. You on the Huckabee train now?
So matt, because someone did something 15 years ago, that makes it off limits?
“So either Huckabee was woefully ignorant about the nature of AIDS, or he supported a quarantine despite the lack of a threat of communicability.”
Possible. Or – he knew his constituency was ‘woefully ignorant’ and played to that.
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Left by The Right’s Field » A More Selective Human
December 8, 2007 at 3:52pm