Mike Huckabee: “Compassionate Conservative”

1:10 pm EST December 8th, 2007 | News | 3 Comments

They’re all the same.

Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could “pose a dangerous public health risk.”

As a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 1992, Huckabee answered 229 questions submitted to him by The Associated Press. Besides a quarantine, Huckabee suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies.

“If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague,” Huckabee wrote.

“It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. 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.”

I should note that this line of thinking came from Huckabee in 1992, a date by which only fucking knuckle dragging assholes thought we should quarantine people with AIDS.

UPDATE: I’ll give kudos here to Jonathan Adler of the conservative National Review for putting up a good pre-buttal to the red herring I expect to hear from Huckabee defenders.

Assuming the survey response excerpts reported by the AP are representative, and not taken out of a mitigating context, this is a pretty outrageous position for Huckabee to have held at the time. This was not the early 1980s, when the threat posed by the HIV virus was poorly understood. Rather it was 1992, long after it was understood that AIDS could not be transmitted through casual contact. So either Huckabee was woefully ignorant about the nature of AIDS, or he supported a quarantine despite the lack of a threat of communicability. Neither interpretation speaks well of him.

Many of you will remember that America’s knowledge about the AIDS virus was significantly enhanced by the work of Dr. C. Everett Koop, Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General. I remember to this day the letter that was sent to my house explaining the virus.

In 1988, he mailed a congressionally-mandated information brochure on AIDS to every American household. As he recollected, during this period “AIDS took over my life.” Through his report and his many speeches and interviews on AIDS Koop did more than any other public official to shift the terms of the public debate over AIDS from the moral politics of homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and intravenous drug use, practices through which AIDS was spread, to concern with the medical care, economic position, and civil rights of AIDS sufferers. Similarly, Koop promoted redefining the prevalent scientific model of the disease, from a contagion akin to bubonic plague, yellow fever, and other deadly historic epidemics that required the strongest public health measures–mandatory testing and quarantine of carriers–to a chronic disease that was amenable to long-term management with drugs and behavioral changes.

4 years after this, Mike Huckabee said we ought to lock up AIDS patients.

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3 Responses to “Mike Huckabee: “Compassionate Conservative””

  1. Benny says:
    December 8, 2007 at 3:33 pm

    Good work, OW. It will come in handy.

    What happened to the Forum?

    Oh, happy belated b-day!

  2. Diamond LeGrande says:
    December 8, 2007 at 5:00 pm

    Maybe he didn’t read the memo, or, like a good wingnut, he avoids the MSM.

    Oh, oops, forgot your birthday. My bad. Happy birthday.

  3. C.S.Strowbridge says:
    December 9, 2007 at 6:09 am

    “What happened to the Forum?”

    I’ve been wondering that myself.