I read some of his comments about the disease at the time. He didn't come across as Xenophobic...just honest.

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Even if you hold the minority opinion, stick to your guns and go against the flow if that's what you truly believe. (CnRedd)

Oh, I am sure he was speaking from his heart.

But Fred Phelps speaks from his heart too.
Honesty and xenophobia are not mutually exclusive.

And finding something amiss with something doesn't automatically make someone a xenophobe. Making an observation is far from fear or hatred.
Definition of xenophobia - Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

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Even if you hold the minority opinion, stick to your guns and go against the flow if that's what you truly believe. (CnRedd)

Look, people, I was working for the Veterans' Hospital in Houston Texas in 1986 and when I oriented for that job, most of the general questions thrown out were about AIDS. As health care workers a lot of people still didn't know how it was spread. And I can tell you for a fact a lot of us didn't take anything as written in stone after the facts were reported.
And that was probably because every communicable disease epidemic in this country except AIDS went through years of quarantine and testing before authorities were sure how it spread. As I mentioned before, we have only recently found that TB is not as contagious as first considered. You may still be confined to your home and your family tested, but you no longer say good bye to friends and family for up to two years and go away to some treatment facility. Plus the prescribed treatment has gotten better.
It scared a lot of people because there was a lot of political pressure to find the pathway.
So...someone in a non medical field could have still been in the dark in 1992 and not neccessarily because he was a right wing nut.

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Okay while I think that the Governor's idea to keep AIDS patients isolated was uninformed, I do not buy that he was doing so out of malice. I do not think that the Governor is the best advocate for the gay movement, but I don't think that he is opposed to working with anyone on a respectful level.

If Huckabee is the man for the Republicans, I'm not going to pitch a fit because he supports the "Golden Rule" and has said as much on many occasions. I don't see him as radically anti-homosexual as some of the others in the race.

Let's cut the man a little slack.

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Huckabee's position on quarantining AIDS patients was misinformed at the very least. By 1992, it was well-established that AIDS was not a "gay" disease, that it was not spread by casual contact, and that the homosexual community had been pro-active in slowing the spread of AIDS through intensive dessimination of information and testing.

Do I think his stance was "round up the homos and we can stop AIDS"? Not for one second. I think he was just making an misinformed statement that echoed some very uneducated assertions.

If anything, it seems to be a "drug addict" and MSM disease. Considering the most likely ways of it spreading....Women either have to catch it from drugs or from a drug addicted or MSM man.

A strictly heterosexual non-drug addicted male is still pretty safe from infection.


Looking at AIDS transmission statistics, a quarantine of those most likely to continue the behaviors that infected them in the first place would have made a lot of sense. Now that AIDS isn't 100% fatal, the urgency isn't there any more. But in 1992, I can see a quarantine making a lot of sense.

Drug addicts are killing themselves anyway, what do they care about spreading HIV? The man said quarantine AIDS patients, not gay people.

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Even if you hold the minority opinion, stick to your guns and go against the flow if that's what you truly believe. (CnRedd)

Yeah but that is exactly where the spin was headed. Better to just address it and put an end to it before anyone has a chance to try to attribute that to him.

When that comment was made, he was specifically speaking on AIDS patients. These answers were on an AP questionnaire...
Huckabee Wanted to Isolate AIDS Patients - TIME

It seems he DID give his impressions of gay people, and admittedly, they weren't positive, but they were separate from his opinion on AIDS sufferers.

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Even if you hold the minority opinion, stick to your guns and go against the flow if that's what you truly believe. (CnRedd)

I disagree. There were still many misconceptions and misunderstandings about AIDS in 1992. I can say this because I working in the medical field by that point and time in my life. We actually 'isolated' our AIDS patients from the rest of the patients in the nursing home or hospital wing, and we garbed up before going into their rooms. Once medical equipment went into their rooms, it stayed until their discharge or death. Now we don't do those sorts of things anymore... but we did in 1992 (I am speaking from my own personal experiences). So... I have to disagree with you on that point IP.