Huckabee Confronts His Past Comments About AIDS

In 1992 Campaign for Senate From Arkansas, Suggested Quarantining AIDS Patients

By JAKE TAPPER and KEVIN CHUPKA via ABC News

Dec. 9, 2007 —

As former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee soared to first place in polls among Republican presidential candidates in Iowa and to second place in many national polls, he is being gifted with both opportunity and further scrutiny.

Huckabee found himself this weekend explaining proposals he made during his disastrous 1992 Senate race, when he suggested AIDS patients be quarantined. For the most part, Huckabee defended his views from 17 years ago.

In an Associated Press survey from 1992, Huckabee suggested that the government isolate AIDS patients from the rest of the populace.

"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," he wrote. "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."

Saturday evening, at a brief press conference in Asheville, N.C., Huckabee explained his quarantine proposal.

"Fifteen years ago, the AIDS crisis was just that, a crisis," he said. "There was still a great deal of, I think, uncertainty about just how widespread AIDS was, how it could be transmitted. So we know more now than we did in 1992, all of us do -- hopefully."

Read the rest.