"Fighting AIDS and Bias"

I admire what Diane Hardy has done to help in HIV/AIDS awareness. I share her concern about the spread of AIDS among Afro-American minorities, and I too congratulate those who provide care to AIDS patients. However, I must take issue with the criticism in her "Community Columnist" today that AIDS is demonized because of the linkage between it and behavior when so many other disease-behavior links are treated differently.

Our decisions, no matter how personal, play out in the lives of others. When one gets the diagnosis of heart problems, diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels, the entire family is affected by dietary and lifestyle changes. Those changes will probably benefit everyone. However, if a person afflicted by one of those health issues does not change diet and behavior, the family will eventually have to care for that person as a patient. The impact of a person's behavior now begins to have major impact on loved ones, friends or fellow employees.

The difference with HIV is that it is communicable. A person with HIV is giving that deadly disease to someone else--a stranger, a "friend with benefits", the love of one's life or an unborn child. This is a far bigger deal! There is a reason why it carries a stigma! For growing numbers of HIV cases, contagion is through heterosexual sex. An action that should be the most lovingly, intimate gesture is now deadly.

Poor individual decisions can have a measurable impact on our culture. Will we watch young Afro-Americans contract a disease that began little more than 20 years ago with one person who made "personal" decisions that were "nobody's business but his own"? Will we continue to mislead youngsters that their personal decision to have sex, as long as they use "protection", won't wipe out their entire neighborhood twenty years from now?

Regardless of a person's age, the personal choice to have sex outside of marriage is accelerating the spread of HIV/AIDS. The at-risk group now includes all of us; we are one infected person away from HIV. and we don't know who that one person is.

A culture decided to make personal choice sacred regardless of what those choices did to self, family, culture or society. In this state, our government agencies, our schools, our health providers, our press are all scrambling to keep that choice sacred no matter what. Unfortunately, the "no matter what" happens to be our lives.

They're losing the battle. A piece of latex is not saving us from HIV. A new weapon is needed but they keep ignoring the best artillery around. The American people are capable of good decisions especially when done for the best of intentions--to save the ones they love. That's where to place our trust; not in a condom.