Profiles in Cowardice

Another faith-based candidate for president. From WaPo:

Mike Huckabee once 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."

As a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 1992, Huckabee answered 229 questions submitted to him by The Associated Press. Besides a quarantine, Huckabee suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies. . . .

At a news conference in Asheville, N.C., on Saturday, Huckabee said he wanted at the time to follow traditional medical practices used for dealing with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

"Medical protocol typically says that if you have a disease for which there is no cure, and you are uncertain about the transmission of it, then the first thing you do is that you quarantine or isolate carriers," Huckabee said.

When Huckabee wrote his answers in 1992, it was common knowledge that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact. In late 1991, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there were 195,718 AIDS patients in the country and that 126,159 people had died from the syndrome.

Contrast this passage on the reaction of Fr. Mychal Judge. Andrew Sullivan, quoting himself:

We forget how terrifying HIV was in the early and mid 1980s, how patients would be quarantined in dark rooms, abandoned by their families, with their meals rolled into their rooms on trolleys. From the beginning, Mychal did as Jesus did and walked right in and kissed these frightened souls on the lips. If they recoiled from the sight of a priest - gay men at that time saw the church as an alien, hostile entity - he would persist in silence. He would simply bring holy oils, take a chair to the bottom of their hospital beds, and massage their bony, cold, pain-racked feet. He seemed to express no anger, just a kind of suspended joy in the moment, a joy he found resuscitated by the fact of the resurrection and the intercession of Our Lady.

Let's consider that the stance of someone like Huckabee -- and those to whom he is trying desperately to appeal -- embodies not only ignorance but a deep-seated cowardice. To proclaim oneself a "Christian" and react to the needy by demanding that they be shut away sort of misses the point, doesn't it? This of course applies not only to Huckabee, but to the entire complex of those who have fastened on a grotesque mockery of the lessons of a teacher whose compassion, love, and courage was far beyond what we can really understand to push a mean-spirited agenda that reveals only the smallness of their souls.

And on that score, read Sullivan's whole piece on Judge. It reminds me of something the patriarchal monotheisms have forgotten -- or suppressed: throughout history, and probably before: those with "aberrant" sexual orientations have been seen almost universally as persons of great spiritual power, a bridge between male and female and between the spirit world and the mundane -- conduits, if you will, for the grace of god. We see it again in people like Mychal Judge. I think that's why we scare the right so much.