Pence's incoming chief of staff apologizes for college column disparaging people living with AIDS | TheHill - The Hill

Vice President Pence's incoming chief of staff apologized Tuesday for a column he wrote 27 years ago while in college that disparaged people living with HIV and AIDS.

“I regret using language as an undergraduate college student that was not reflective of the respect I try to show others today,” Marc Short said in a statement to the Daily Beast, the news outlet that broke the story on the article Short had written for his college newspaper. 

“We have all learned a lot about AIDS over the past 30 years and my heart goes out to all the victims of this terrible disease,” Short said in the statement.

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In the column from 1992, which was unearthed by Democratic opposition research group American Bridge, Short wrote that “repugnant” homosexual intercourse was the leading cause of the transmission of HIV and AIDS.

He criticized “the propaganda campaign ignited by gay activists and carelessly perpetuated by journalists whose intent is to scare all heterosexuals into believing they are prime targets for contraction of the disease.”

“The campaign's purpose,” Short wrote, “is both to lobby Congress for more federal funding of AIDS research and to destigmatize the perverted lifestyles homosexuals pursue.”

The article was published in W&L Spectator, a conservative publication co-founded by Short at Washington & Lee University.

Short was appointed as Pence's chief of staff earlier this month after previously serving the White House legislative director and on Pence's staff when he was in the House.

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