“We need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague,” declared Mike Huckabee. The plague to which Huckabee referred: HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
It was back in 1992 that Mike Huckabee made the suggestion of putting HIV patients into special detention centers. Huckabee said that not so much attention should be paid to the “civil rights” of people with AIDS.
Now, in 2007, Huckabee excuses his proposal by saying that “There was still a great deal of, I think, uncertainty,” about HIV. So, when there is a problem, and people aren’t sure how to solve it yet, we can see that a President Mike Huckabee would err on the side of take away people’s civil rights and shoving them into detention camps.
In fact, there really wasn’t a lot of uncertainty about HIV at the time. The Surgeon General had, years before, written an advisory correctly advising public officials that there was no cause for panic.
There was a great deal of cause for concern about the suffering by those who had AIDS, however. So, what was the response of Mike Huckabee, the man who now promotes himself as a great “Christian leader”? Huckabee said that the federal government should not support any AIDS research. Let Hollywood actors pay for AIDS research, if they were bothered by the suffering caused by the disease, Huckabee said.
So, when confronted by a deadly disease around which he believes that there’s a great deal of “uncertainty”, Mike Huckabee thinks that the proper response is not to research the disease? If that’s what Mike Huckabee regards as Christian charity, and he’s promising to be a Christian President, then why would any compassionate American support Huckabee for President
Mike Huckabee says that it’s all water under the bridge, and that, if he were to speak about AIDS today, he might say things “a little differently.” A little differently? What does that mean? Would he suggest detention camps for AIDS patients, but with free movies? Would Huckabee propose an end to AIDS research, but using a OUIJA board to try to find out how to treat the disease?
Mike Huckabee justified his radical proposals for dealing with people with HIV by saying that “homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle”. Well, I don’t know much about sin. I admit that it’s beyond me to understand how civil rights and research into curing deadly disease are aberrant. I guess I’ll have to leave that to professional preachers like Mike Huckabee.
(Sources: ABC News, December 9, December 8, 2007)
