Ryan White's Mother Slams Huckabee for His Hateful AIDS Remarks

Posted by GottaLaff , Cliff Schecter's Blog at 2:57 PM on December 11, 2007.

Mike Huckabee's comments about AIDS patients needing to be feared quarantined isolated didn't go over too well, especially with the mother of a boy who had the disease back in the 1980s.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's 15-year-old comments that AIDS patients should have been isolated have so alarmed the mother of Ryan White, an Indiana teenager whose life-ending battle with AIDS in the 1980s engrossed the nation, that she has asked for a meeting.

Pastor Huck needs a good talkin' to.

The GOP front-runner in Iowa's Jan. 3 caucuses stood by his 1992 comments in a broadcast interview Sunday, infuriating Jeanne White-Ginder, the late teen's mother and a board member of the AIDS Institute.

"It's so alarming to me," she said in a telephone interview Monday with The Associated Press from her home in Leesburg, Fla.

Yuckabee is alarming in more ways than one, but you can read about that here. Meanwhile, let's try to bring this guy into the 21st century:

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

Ryan would have made a better presidential candidate, by a longshot.

On Tuesday, the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, and the AIDS Institute sent 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."

Tagged as: aids, election08, huckabee, ryan white

GottaLaff is a regular blogger for Cliff Schecter's Blog