Same as it ever was.
Aids, Public Morality, and Public Health
In Los Angeles in the summer of 1983, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) killed three babies. These deaths made it plain for all with eyes to see that this disease posed an issue of public morality, as well as one of public health. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the moral blindness of those with public authority has prevented or stalled a solution to even the problems of public health caused by AIDS.
The three babies had been born prematurely and thus required a number of blood transfusions. The doctors who cared for them believed that one or more of the 57 persons who supplied the blood were carriers of AIDS, which is to say that they were very active homosexuals. Nevertheless, Dr. Shirley Fanin, Los Angeles County’s deputy associate director for communicable disease programs, refused to try to identify the AIDS donor. Fanin said she feared to “disrupt” the lifestyles of citizens. Apparently, the probability that the same donor might kill again-indeed, the possibility that he might be deliberately contaminating the blood supply, as has since been reported in at least one case-was not as important to the public health bureaucracy as the homosexuals’ right to privacy.
Dr. Fanin’s overdeveloped sense of delicacy about “gay rights” is not at all unusual among public health professionals. Wherever AIDS is spreading, those responsible for the public’s good health and for the education of the public about health and disease have a similar attitude, even in the face of what they themselves claim to be the most deadly disease known to humanity.
Consider what happened in Miami about a year ago, when the death of a surgeon was handled with the same characteristic delicacy. “We don’t have any confirmation in writing,” the director of the Dade County Health Department said with obvious circumspection, “that AIDS has been diagnosed.” Yet Dr. Robert Katims of the Florida Board of Medical Examiners did not hesitate to declare flatly, “Every doctor in Dade County knows” that the surgeon died of AIDS. However, when it comes to AIDS, what every doctor knows and indeed what every citizen knows, namely that it would cease if male homosexual practices would cease, is deliberately ignored by the public health bureaucrats.
Nowhere is moral preciousness about this deadly disease more frankly professed than in San Francisco, which has the greatest number of AIDS victims per capita and which has a politically powerful homosexual faction. There public health officials are reported to have refused to publicize the results of studies of the extent of AIDS and of the precise means by which it is spread. The officials claimed to fear that the general public would understand the results “out of context” and become alarmed at “gay lifestyles.”
However, it is in New York, the state with by far the greatest number of AIDS cases, that the practice of slighting public health for the sake of “gay rights” is public policy. When AIDS began to become a national political issue, the New York State AIDS Task Force’s Initial Report to the Governor (June 21, 1983) argued that in dealing with the problem of AIDS the first responsibility of government is the protection of the rights of homosexuals!...
