AIDS at 25: Shame, Fear and Stigma at the White House
HIV/AIDS is now older than many of the lives lost to it along the way, and while the shock of it has worn off in the US, where access to decent health care and medical treatments makes the disease "manageable," AIDS shows no signs of being under control. Today's New York Times features several short profiles of people whose lives have been touched by the disease. One telling line in the article states "AIDS is often cast as an epidemic of bad choices. But it is also ... an epidemic of the choiceless."
HIV/AIDS is now older than many of the lives lost to it along the way, and while the shock of it has worn off in the US, where access to decent health care and medical treatments makes the disease "manageable," AIDS shows no signs of being under control. Today's New York Times features several short profiles of people whose lives have been touched by the disease. One telling line in the article states "AIDS is often cast as an epidemic of bad choices. But it is also … an epidemic of the choiceless."
The tension of being choiceless seems hard for the Bush Adminstration to grasp, even as they promote policies that would limit choices of many Americans. What was evident last week at the United Nations meetings on HIV/AIDS is that AIDS will continue to run rampant until people can grasp that not everyone in the world has a choice, and that marriage only works if it is chosen by equal partners, not when women are sold into marriage like chattel, or forced to obey in cultures and societies where women have little or no power.
Ambassador Jimmy Kolker, part of the US delegation to the UN meetings, talked about erasing stigma as being important to solving the AIDS pandemic while at the UN last week. But the US negotiators did nothing to erase the stigma, like naming vulnerable groups in the context of the UN document so governments around the world could be held accountable for how they treat people most at risk.
First Lady Laura Bush put the best face she could on her husband's policies on Friday at the UN but looked as out of touch as her husband's administration when followed to the podium by Secretary General Kofi Anan. Anan's courageous leadership on AIDS is one reason the world has a fighting chance to beat the disease. On Saturday, President Bush continued to add to the political and social stigmatization of gay people by denying their relationships and supporting the perversion of the Constitution of the United States to define marriage as one man and one woman.
"From the start, I said you need to acknowledge our civil rights, you need to recognize our relationships, to have any chance of containing and preventing AIDS," he said. "Shame and fear make it worse," said Dr. Lawrence D. Mass in the NYT article. Dr. Mass wrote about a mysterious disease affecting the gay community in New York before the CDC acknowledged it in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 25 years ago today.
Shame and fear prevented politicians from understanding and acting to prevent the spread of this disease before it was too late. Shame and fear prevents many people from being tested and others from acknowledging their status or practicing safe sex when they know better. Shame and fear continue to be the real plague that allows HIV/AIDS to flourish and while some people in the world get this, it is clear the President of the United States, and the conservative ideologues who promote Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage-Between-a-Man-and-a-Woman policies do not.
The President's radio address stigmatizing gay relationships appears to have been nothing more than him politically placating his conservative base as the Senate appears not to have the votes to pass the Constitutional Amendment. But they will debate it and campaign on it — and the damage will be done. More shame, more stigma, more fear.
It is President Bush's failure to see the connection of his reckless rhetoric, and how it fosters the shame, fear and stigma that causes AIDS to spread, that is most troubling. It is the Adminstration's failure to see how their policies of failing to recognize vulnerable populations like sex workers and drug users by name, or allowing organizations to work with those populations to educate and provide condoms to prevent disease, means that AIDS will flourish.
George Will wrote in his column marking the anniversary that, "Human beings do learn. But they often do at a lethally slow pace." His point was that behavior change amongst sexually active people takes time. Apparently it does amongst the politically active as well.