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

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.

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.

"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."