Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s HIV comments have caused quite a stink. We were stunned to hear that the Southern Baptist preacher man once advocated quarantining AIDS patients. Then, when asked to clarify his comments, Huckabee refused to recant his statement.
As the outraged din grows into a roar, one voice definitely deserves to be heard: Jeanne White-Ginder.
White-Ginder’s son, of course, was Ryan White: the 18-year who died after contracting HIV via a blood transfusion and captured our national heart. The Florida resident tells the Associated Press she’d like to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with Huckabee:
It’s so alarming to me. It’s very important to me that we don’t live in the darkness… We have to treat this disease like a disease, and like Ryan always said, not like a dirty word.
Huckabee may have to relearn the entire English language!
Matt
I think what’s worse than the original idea of a quarantine (in the early days of AIDS there was a lot of nonsense generated by fear and misunderstanding and ignorance), but that he stands by it today! Set aside for a moment the moral outrageousness of his position–we’ve seen this sort of bull-headed never-admit-mistakes attitude for the last 8 years…we don’t need any more of that. And spending 8 years of watching wretched, immoral policy wrapped up as “compassionate” has been bad enough; Huckabee offers the same vile creamy center but with a smug, self-righteous, fundy christian coating.
Jake
I didn’t know Rosanne Barr was Ryan’s mom!