Hopefully this comment will burst the bubble of the folks who support Mike Huckabee.

GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said Sunday he wonÂ’t run from his statement 15 years ago that AIDS patients should have been isolated.

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. He cited revelations in 1991 that a dentist had infected a patient in an extraordinary case that highlighted the risk of infection through contact with blood or bodily fluids.

“I still believe this today,” he said in a broadcast interview, 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, as a Senate candidate that year, told The Associated Press 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.

And here's my problem with that statement -- it flies in the face of what we know today. One could still -- barely -- take the silly position taken by Huckabee at the time. Now we know, unambiguously so, that his position is wrong. We don't need to intern AIDS patients in some sort of concentration camp. And while isolation might be advisable for some few individuals in this country who willfully spread their disease, we are pretty clear on the concept that such individuals are few and far between.

I'd almost been willing to see Mike Huckabee on the GOP ticket, despite my misgivings about another tax-raising governor from Hope, Arkansas being permitted in the same zip code as the White House. Not now -- not at all.

H/T The Liberty Papers

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Posted by: Greg at 02:50 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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