Christianist Mike Huckabee is standing by his 1992 call to lock up AIDS patients…

Huckabee stands by ’92 comments on AIDS, gays

Mike Huckabee says he stands by his statements fifteen years ago about AIDS patients, though he concedes he might phrase them differently today.

How many different ways can you say "Death Camps" Mike…? 

In some old candidate questionnaires the Associated Press has dug up, Huckabee suggested back then that AIDS patients should essentially be quarantined.

"Fifteen years ago, the AIDS crisis was just that. It was a crisis," Huckabee told reporters at a campaign stop in Asheville, N.C. this weekend. "There were a lot of questions back in that time as to just how the disease could be carried. There was just a real panic in this country."

But as Dan Savage noted the other day…

A reader asks, “what’s the big deal?” After all, didn’t a lot of people advocate quarantine for AIDS patients early in the epidemic? Yeah, early in the epidemic some did advocate just that—and not just bigots salivating at the prospect of rounding up all gay people, diseased or not. But that was early in the epidemic, very early, 1984-86. By 1992 only raving bigots were still talking about quarantining people with AIDS or HIV. People like, you know, Mike Huckabee.

You need to pay attention to that, because even back in the early stages of the AIDS outbreak, people talking about rounding up and "quarantining" AIDS victims weren’t doing that out of concern with the spread of the disease itself, as with the ever growing visibility of the people they despised:

Huckabee said he also stands by his words that homosexuality is sinful.

What a coincidence, that.  Huckabee was far from the only one still calling for an AIDS "quarantine" by the 1990s, and yes, the ones who were just also happened to have a bottomless bit of animus toward homosexual people.  One they often dressed up in biblical rhetoric that was as cheap as it was transparent.

If AIDS had hit America in the early 1950s, the Huckabees of the world would have without a doubt gotten their wish and every homosexual the authorities could identify would have been rounded up and locked into concentration camps…and from there, isolated from the rest of the American community who didn’t have to see, didn’t have to care, didn’t have to know, a final solution to the sexual pervert problem would have been just one small step away.  In 1986 William F. Buckley shocked even many of his fellow wingers by advocating the forcible tattooing of AIDS victims, once on the arm, and once on the buttocks, he claimed to prevent the spread of the disease via shared needles and sex.  He only withdrew his suggestion after being forced to admit that the plan had an "unfortunate association" with the Holocaust. 

AIDS didn’t happen in 1950, it happened in the early 80s, over a decade of gay rights activism after Stonewall, and the republican right wing theocratic base is deeply resentful to this day that they didn’t get their chance back then to let their hate run free and unfettered over the lives of all gay people, whether we had the disease or not, and gleefully stomp the human life out of us.