Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's comments about AIDS over 15 years ago still resonate in the minds of those affected.
The mother of Ryan White, an Indiana teenager whose life-ending battle with AIDS in the 1980s engrossed the nation, wants has asked for a meeting with Huckabee to discuss his statement.
Huckabee stood by his 1991 comments in a broadcast Sunday, upsetting Jeanne White-Ginder, the late teen's mother and a board member of the AIDS Institute.
White was 13 when he was diagnosed with AIDS in December 1984, having contracted the disease from the blood-clotting agent used to treat his hemophilia. He was barred from school the following year out of fear the disease was spread casually. He died in 1990 at age 18.
As a Senate candidate in 1992, Huckabee told the AP in a questionnaire that "we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague" if the federal government was going to deal with the spread of the disease effectively. "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," he said then.
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.
Once an underdog, Huckabee has risen to become somewhat of a frontrunner for the GOP candidacy as he has been successful in the Iowa caucuses.
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