Opinion: It doesn’t matter that he’s “not mad at anybody”
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Turns out that beneath Mike Huckabee’s charming aw-shucks exterior lie the flat-Earth social views that don’t offer much hope to those on the wrong end of the former Arkansas governor’s beliefs. Take his recent refusal to retract a statement he made about HIV/AIDS patients 15 years ago:
Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee refused to retract a statement he made in 1992 calling for the isolation of AIDS patients. Responding to an Associated Press questionnaire, Huckabee said steps should be taken to ‘isolate the carriers of this plague’ during his failed run for a U.S. Senate seat from Arkansas 15 years ago. He said he probably would not make the same statement today because of what is known about how HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is transmitted. ‘I had simply made the point -- and I still believe this today -- that in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when we didn’t know as much as we do now about AIDS, we were acting more out of political correctness than we were about the normal public health protocols that we would have acted,’ Huckabee told Fox News on Sunday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in 1985 that AIDS was not transmitted by casual contact. But Huckabee said at the time, ‘there were other concerns being voiced by public health officials.’ He disputed the characterization that he was calling for individuals infected with HIV to be quarantined. ‘Now, would I say things a little differently in 2007? Probably so,’ Huckabee told Fox News. ‘But I’m not going to recant or retract from the statement that I did make because, again, the point was not saying we ought to lock people up who have HIV/AIDS.’
So his only regret about such a stupid statement even by 1992 standards (when it was well known you couldn’t contract HIV by getting sneezed on) is that, ‘probably,’ he would ‘say things a little differently’ now? Even if he didn’t mean that ‘we ought to lock up’ HIV/AIDS patients, any government-enforced isolation would profoundly violate the rights of those living with a virus that isn’t terribly easy to transmit. That was true in ’92 as much as it is today.
Still, Huckabee’s refusal to retract his HIV statement isn’t all that surprising. Indeed, the fact that his only regret about the ’92 gaffe is his word choice reveals a major Huckabee campaign tactic: hiding his Falwell-esque Bible-thumping views behind a very un-radical, likable demeanor. As Huckabee likes to say, ‘I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at anybody.’
It doesn’t matter that Huckabee isn’t mad — what’s important is what he believes. The Southern Baptist minister wants to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage and enshrine the ‘right to life,’ which would imperil American women’s abortion rights. Huckabee’s advocacy of a ‘right to life’ amendment goes further than what many mainstream conservatives advocate: overturning Roe vs. Wade, and allowing states to regulate abortion themselves. A ‘right to life’ amendment probably wouldn’t give states and women a choice — no abortion, period.
Under a Huckabee presidency, women seeking safe abortions and homosexuals would be far worse off than they are now, no matter how nice the commander-in-chief is about imposing his religious beliefs. To those millions of women and gay citizens, it doesn’t matter if such amendments are passed with a smile or some hateful rhetoric out of the Old Testament — in the end, their rights end up equally trampled.
If anything, Huckabee’s comments on HIV/AIDS patients may finally spark a critical examination of the newly crowned front-runner’s views. He’s more than just a good ol’ boy who happens to aspire to the nation’s highest office.