Oh, Just Leave our little Mikey Alone

Family Research Council,Tony Perkins supports Huckabee hateful statements about people with HIV and homosexuality (advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could "pose a dangerous public health risk.") and he predicts a backlash if the scrutiny continues:

Tony Perkins: There is clearly a reverse religious standard being applied to Mike Huckabee, a standard that says there will be no defining religious beliefs. I would hope the other candidates, including the Democrats, would clearly and absolutely denounce this reverse religious test and keep the media from going further down this path. If not, I predict that bible-believing Christians will step over policy differences they have with Mike Huckabee to stand by and support a candidate who is being attacked because he believes, as they do, that their Christian faith should actually impact the way they live. If that happens, the recent meteoric rise of the Huckabee campaign in the polls could look minuscule compared to the tsunami of support that he will get from Christians who are tired of the elites who belittle their beliefs and attempt to rob them of every public reflection of their faith.

AIDS Comments Alarm Ryan White's Mother

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."

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.

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."

In response, Huckabee told reporters in Council Bluffs, Iowa: "I certainly never would want to say anything that would be hurtful to them or anyone else. I would have great regret and anxiety if I thought my comments were hurtful or in any way added to the already incredible pain that families have felt regardless of how they contracted AIDS."