AIDS and civil liberties: A comment

The two articles on AIDS by Charles Hunt publislied in Monthly Review in January and February 1988 were a welcome contribution to discussion of an important question which has ebeen too much and too long ignored by many socialist publications. But after reading them I felt that a number of issues had been given too little attention and others needed some criticism.

The development of ideology and public policy regarding AIDS is producing a nightmare growth of prejudice and discrimination against a number of groups, notably gay people; peoplee of color, particularly if they come from the African continent; and people who use drugs intravenously. This friglitening new wave of bigotry is reflected in and aided by the vocabulkary and concepts with which the epidemic has been discussed; and one of the most important of these has been the concept of "high-risk groups," which is still unfortunately employed by Charles Hunt.

The identification of high-risk groups for AIDS, when these are defined by their sexuality, nationality, or addiction to drugs, is inaccurate and dangerously misleading. The fact that a person is homosexual, for instance, has nothing whatsoever to do with his or her level of risk of getting AIDS; what affects the degree of risk are specific sexual acts and other actvities. There are high-risk practices but, in the way they are usually defined, no high-risk social groups. The persistent vocabulary of high-risk groups, however, although in many instances not in-intentioneed, has had very bad results, converting fear of tlie disease into prejudice against the social groups who have become identified with it. It has reinforced already existing prejudices and that fact has meant that, while in practice members of the high-risk groups have no higher risk of AIDS merely because of their membership in one of those groups, they certainly have had a higher risk of suffering at the hands of AIDS-related panic and prejudice.

The association made between AIDS and social groups that are already discriminated against in countries like the United States has conditioned the wholly inadequate response to the disease by public health authorities, the media, and others. An implicit ideology developed that AIDS was likely to restrict its attack to social groups with low prestige who had largely brought on the infection by their own deviant behaviour. Therefore, the epidemic did not deserve to be given importance by the "general public." This approach was exemplified as late as November 7, 1986 by an editorial in the augustly liberal New York Times, in which it was argued that AIDS did not yet justify panic because its incidence was still overwhelmingly restricted to drug addicts, homosexuals, and Africans. In extreme cases AIDS has been interpreted as a desirable retriubtion.,(either accidental or God-sent), an agent of societal cleansing, restoring a less permissive sexual morality.

In either its coticeritrated or diluted form, this has been the general response to AIDS across the political spectrum. So it is important forr socialists not to divorce the analysis of AIDS and the means to combat it from an understanding of various forms of social prejudice, which include xenopliobla, racism, anti-drug prejudice, and, in the United States at least, most of all homophobla. A great number of the measures which have been and are suggested to combat AIDS have no rational justification, given what is known about the disease. They are an expression partly of a natural and rational fear of the disease combined with an ignorance that is also often understandable given the way in which information is made available. But they are also powerful expression of social prejudices such as homophobia and xenophobia; many other diseases that can be transmitted in similar ways or even more easily do not provoke the same reactions or proposals.

There has been a massive growth of discriminatory measures against people in the so-called "high-risk groups," restricting their right to travel, to receive education, to live where they choose, to work, and to obtain medical and life insurance. They and sometimes even larger sections of the population are being obliged to undergo compulsory testing for the presence of antibodies to the HIV virus.

It important to recognize that such restrictions are extremely unlikely to restrict the spread of the epidemic; and there is good reason to suppose that by encouraging concealment and non-cooperation with public health measures and education, they will worsen the situation. They must be strongly resisted because they represent a major attack on civil rights and liberties that is at the same time potentially dangerous to public health. It is clear that only widespread education about how the disease is communicated and how its spread can be reduced (safe sex and clean needles) can help to stop the danger.

Irrational repressive measures have been taken or advocated by governments and political forces of virtually all shades. The most rigorous measures now in force are to be found in Bavaria, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia on the one hand and in Cuba and the USSR on the other. But there is no shortage ofadvocates of similar measures in the capitalist democracies. For all the repressiveness of reactions in the United States, the presence of all established gay movement there has in some states helped non-discriminatory legislation to be passed, something which has happened less or not at all in Western European and socialist countries.

Charles Hunt argues that, "The social analysis of the AIDS crisis must not . . . stop with liberal/conservative dichotomies and debates concerning civil liberties." True enough, but the attack on

' 'I liberties's very intense; thc need for resistance to it is very urgent. The attack comes not only from capitalist forces normally seen as being right-wing; it is present in other places than the United States. It seems to me very insufficient to argue that we (i.e. socialists) "must be concerned with these debates." We must surely be in the forefront of resistance to these attacks wherever they happen.

And we should attach more importance to the central role which reactionary ideology is playing in conditioning the way in which the "inhumanity of American medicine" is showing itself in this instance.

COPYRIGHT 1988 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
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