Huckabee; AIDS

Mike Huckabee said fifteen years ago that AIDS patients should be cut off from the rest of society, and says he stands by those comments today.

The mother of Ryan White begs to differ.

That has infuriated Jeanne White-Ginder, who said: "It's so alarming to me."

In a telephone interview Monday with The Associated Press from her home in Leesburg, Fla., she said: "It's very important to me that we don't live in the darkness" when people thought AIDS was transmitted through casual contact, such as by "kissing, tears, sweat and saliva."

"We have to treat this disease like a disease, and like Ryan always said, not like a dirty word," she said.

White was 13 when he was diagnosed with AIDS in December 1984, having contracted the disease from the blood-clotting agent used to treat his hemophilia. He was barred from school the following year out of fear the disease was spread casually. He died in 1990 at age 18.

On Tuesday, the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, and the AIDS Institute were sending a letter to Huckabee asking him to meet with White-Ginder — who declined in the interview to say what political party she belongs to — and calling his comments "completely beyond comprehension."

As a Senate candidate in 1992, Huckabee told the AP in a questionnaire 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.

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Huckabee denied that those words were a call to quarantine the AIDS population, although he did not explain how else isolation would be achieved. "I didn't say we should quarantine," he said. The idea was not to "lock people up."