Huckabee puts out a press release clarifying his 1992 comments suggesting quarantining AIDS patients. He claims the comments were made out of "concern first, political correctness last."
I'll quit banging on about this sometime soon, but something else to consider. Read the statement. When was the last time you read something so naive from a major candidate for President? (I'm sure there is one, but it's eluding me right now.) Huckabee seems to be implying three things in the response:
1) Saying that patients should be isolated is not the same as saying they should be quarantined.
I'm not sure how isolation is terribly different from quarantining. It's an issue of semantics, I suppose, but the best that can be said about Huckabee here is that he was advocating 'quarantining lite.' Lovely.
2) In 1992, we did not know enough about AIDS to know that it was not transmittable through casual contact.
This again baffles me. Even if we suppose that the mass public was unaware of how AIDS was transmitted in 1992, Huckabee was a high-profile candidate for U.S. Senate and should hold himself to a higher standard than the uninformed public. Period.
3) American politicians addressed the AIDS virus as early as possible and should be commended for saving so many lives so quickly.
Balderdash. The entire American political system was complicit in ignoring a public health threat until it became an epidemic, for convoluted reasons not incidentally tied to homophobia. This is the accepted account of the zeitgeist. By 1992 Michelangelo Signorile was already preparing to publish the landmark Queer in America, outlining what everybody already knew about Congress' lackluster response to AIDS. By 1992 there was already a passionate and visible AIDS-awareness movement staging widely-covered protests across the country -- notably at hospital facilities in Bethesda. Mike Huckabee must have known about this movement. (It probably scared the shit out of him.) And as a Senate candidate he would have heard from people fighting both for their lives and more federal funding for AIDS research. He cannot claim ignorance.
Mike Huckabee is either hopelessly naive and uninformed, or a vicious anti-gay bigot who argued that gay people should be excluded from society at the precise time that this 'quarantining' argument had been revealed as hysterical nonsense.
This is the smarmiest, stupidest, scariest mea culpa from a major presidential candidate in quite some time.
I'll quit banging on about this sometime soon, but something else to consider. Read the statement. When was the last time you read something so naive from a major candidate for President? (I'm sure there is one, but it's eluding me right now.) Huckabee seems to be implying three things in the response:
1) Saying that patients should be isolated is not the same as saying they should be quarantined.
I'm not sure how isolation is terribly different from quarantining. It's an issue of semantics, I suppose, but the best that can be said about Huckabee here is that he was advocating 'quarantining lite.' Lovely.
2) In 1992, we did not know enough about AIDS to know that it was not transmittable through casual contact.
This again baffles me. Even if we suppose that the mass public was unaware of how AIDS was transmitted in 1992, Huckabee was a high-profile candidate for U.S. Senate and should hold himself to a higher standard than the uninformed public. Period.
3) American politicians addressed the AIDS virus as early as possible and should be commended for saving so many lives so quickly.
Balderdash. The entire American political system was complicit in ignoring a public health threat until it became an epidemic, for convoluted reasons not incidentally tied to homophobia. This is the accepted account of the zeitgeist. By 1992 Michelangelo Signorile was already preparing to publish the landmark Queer in America, outlining what everybody already knew about Congress' lackluster response to AIDS. By 1992 there was already a passionate and visible AIDS-awareness movement staging widely-covered protests across the country -- notably at hospital facilities in Bethesda. Mike Huckabee must have known about this movement. (It probably scared the shit out of him.) And as a Senate candidate he would have heard from people fighting both for their lives and more federal funding for AIDS research. He cannot claim ignorance.
Mike Huckabee is either hopelessly naive and uninformed, or a vicious anti-gay bigot who argued that gay people should be excluded from society at the precise time that this 'quarantining' argument had been revealed as hysterical nonsense.
This is the smarmiest, stupidest, scariest mea culpa from a major presidential candidate in quite some time.
2 Comments:
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Huckabee's point 2 is ridiculous and not believable. Check out the comments to this post.
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