As I was driving into work today I decided to do something I had not done in quite some time. Knowing that I was smart enough to clearly read the tea leaves a few years ago and convert my then Adjustable Rate Mortgage to a fixed rate one, I decided that I was in good enough financial shape to splurge and buy a Starbucks coffee.

As I sat there in the drive through line I started to listen to Stephanie Miller on our fine NOVA-M affiliate here in Phoenix. Ms. Miller was going on and on about Mike Huckabee and some comments he made in 1992 about the AIDS epidemic and how he thought it should be handled. Although I had not heard the quote directly I am fairly sure that Ms. Miller more than likely was correct in what she claimed Mr. Huckabee said. According to her he said something to the affect that AIDS patients had not been handled correctly in the early years of the epidemic by being quarantined. She then went on to make comparisons to leper colonies of the past and suggested that this is what Mr. Huckabee meant.

I was little interested in hearing Huckabee's direct quote until she started in with this line of thought, so off I went to the inter-net and found it.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1207/7270.html

"If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague.... It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. 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." It is obvious from these comments that leper colonies were not where he was going.

Now he made a few comments about funding also but those are neither here nor there for the purposes of this article although I am sure someone will bring them up anyway but I am not here to debate them at this time.

So, as I sat there and waited for my $4.85 cup of premium coffee made through the hard work of many a third world oppressed person, I pondered at great length what the man said 15 years ago about the subject of isolation of the infected.
I think he was right back then and I think he is still right today.

In 1992 I was 22 years old, divorced and living in the newly realigned sexual world where one bad decision did not only render you some blisters of a burning stream of urine, but the potential to kill you slowly while turning you into a carrier for a dreaded and deadly disease that was reported at the time as running ramped through not just the homosexual and poor black communities, but growing in the heterosexual white community as well of which I was and still am a member.

I remember conversations I had with friends at the time as we debated what we would do if we were to find that we were positive for HIV. Suicide was on the table unlike Nukes against Iran today. I remember clearly I asked if they had any idea why the infected were allowed to continue to spread the infection to which one answered that many did not know they even had it because it could lay silent for up to ten years. This was the knowledge of the time. We spoke of stories we had heard, like the dentist mentioned in the article linked to above, and others that we could not confirm that were surely just rumors. We were unsure of the way it got transmitted although we knew for sure that one way was through sex.

I mentioned the old TB hospitals that were used to isolate those infected with that disease many years earlier. I knew of these not from memory but from having lived near one abandoned after its use and later turned into the headquarter of Caesar Chavez, the hated Immigrant Union leader popularized in the 70's for nearly destroying the California Grape harvest on more than one occasion. To this day he is still hated by California farmers and rancher in the San Juaquin Valley. Most of my friends had never heard of them and had little idea that facilities had ever existed for the sole purpose of removing infectious people from the greater community for the protection of the masses while providing proper treatment.

This would have been the logical way of dealing with the AIDS crisis back when it was just that, a crisis. By 1992 the genie was out of the bottle so to speak. So why was it alright to isolate those with TB? Why was it acceptable to isolate those with measles, mumps and other infectious diseases? The process started before we knew exactly how the illnesses were spread. The difference was both the times in which they happened and the population to which they happened to.

Mumps, measles, chicken pox and others are primarily childhood diseases. They have been dealt with in this fashion for hundreds of years. I remember hearing children with chicken pox being magnets for parents who's children had not yet been infected by the illness yet. I took my kids to play with my sisters kids when they got it. But chicken pox rarely leads to death , and it passes fairly quickly with little more than a scar or two. Although there are those rare cases where it returns years later as a form of shingles, but still, rarely fatal. Same with the others. TB on the other hand did kill millions worldwide and still does today, just as AIDS is doing.

So what other factor caused the logic to fly out the window? It was who it first infected, Gays. We in America have a problem with being honest with each other when it comes to Homosexuals. "Not that there's anything wrong with it" became a 90's mantra as a tongue in cheek way of saying that you were OK with the idea that some people did things differently in the privacy of their bedroom. In reality there is something wrong with it in the minds of millions. But Political Correctness forbid someone force the poor beaten down Homosexuals who have a deadly disease be forced to place the public best interest ahead of their battle for equality.

This is the battle fought weakly by most during the 80's. If the Homosexual community would have demanded that infected people be placed in specialized hospitals that would both treat and isolate the infected from the general homosexual and heterosexual communities, AIDS in America might have been kept in check and affected only a small population of those already infected. But because of the growing political correctness of the time America today is infected at a rate equal to that of most of the rest of the modern world. I heard recently that Washington DC is infected at a rate equal to Africa's.

But we were the country that at one time had virtually eradicated TB from its shores. We could have done the same with AIDS. Was Mike Huckabee really that bad of a person for suggesting in retrospect that America had missed an opportunity to save the lives of thousands? I think not.

But what would I know; I'm just an Average American.