We haven’t seen someone get reamed this hard since Backdoor Ram Jammers 5! The late Ryan White’s lawyers absolutely skewer presidential candidate Mike Huckabee over his HIV/AIDS quarantine comments, which he refuses to recant. Here’s the meatiest bit:
Ryan White’s story was the No. 1 news story, and exercising his civil right to be in the classroom with his fellow students and the education of the public on how AIDS was transmitted were the other issues.
Ryan’s story was also the No. 2 most-covered news story in 1986.
Evidently Mr. Huckabee did not read a newspaper in 1985 or 1986.
It seems to us Mr. Huckabee reaffirmation of the statement he made in 1992, that AIDS patients should be isolated, is incomprehensible.
That this man, who is so out of touch with reality, could run for president of the United States is more than disturbing.
That’s going to hurt in the morning.
Neil
I just wanna say. Cuba tested and isolated everyone with aids years ago. If the USA had done this years ago, kept testing their entire population, and banned immigrants with HIV or AIDS, then it would work. But really thats not going to happen in the USA, you guys will fight AIDS with ‘awareness’. Forcing people to get tested would violate their ‘rights’ to have unprotected sex with strangers without any consequence (until they die).
What ever you want to say about Cuba, AIDS isnt a problem there like it is in the rest of the Americas.
Debbie
I can’t seem to gather up any energy to educate Neil-so I’ll just say that the people that are voting for him-or talking him up or whatever it is…are the same ones that got us in the mess with the shrub. Succession works for me.
Elaygee
HIV can be in your system for weeks before it shows on blood tests. Concentration Camps that you argue for wouldn’t stop a thing.
Chris
Neil, Cuba’s HIV policy worked because the country is already under strict government control. Their policy also includes FREE medical care for all HIV positive people (including necessary medication). The isolation period is only 8 weeks and during that time newly infected people are educated and fully treated. Do you really believe that’s what quarantine would have looked like in this country?
Quarantine of HIV carriers would be next to impossible in a open society because it would mean mandatory testing for every American at least 3 times a year, totally closing the borders both in and out (no tourists, no foreign visitors). Even then the nature of the disease would thwart “isolation” (a nice way to say quarantine), since many people would not test positive up to a year after becoming infected.
Aside from the blatant homophobic quality of such a plan, it simply would not work here. Unless we also became a communist dictatorship.
Amethyst
Im not much for the (R) Party but heres another veiw on this topic.
Ryan White’s mother seeks meeting with Mike Huckabee to discuss his comments about AIDS
DES MOINES, Iowa — 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.
(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
http://www3.whdh.com/news/articles/decision_2008/bo68679/-24k