🚀 go-pugleaf

Cowards of Congress Better Get Brave
By Deb Price

Something must be done - and done soon - about the high-risk behavior of one
tiny but politically powerful group.

Driver to gratify a desire unknown to most Americans, its members recklessly
endanger the lives of ordinary men, women and children by dealing with sex
irresponsibly.  Those of us blessedly untouched by this feverish compulsion
must not flinch from calling it by its proper name: re-election.

Terrified of being accused of "promoting" homosexuality, the Cowards of
Congress are a group easily intimidated by Sen. Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.) and his
ilk.  The cowards are the ones smart enough to know better, the ones who
didn't believe Helms' propaganda yet helped him derail federally funded sex
surveys desperately needed fore designing more effective AIDS-prevention
campaigns.

With no AIDS cure or vaccine in sight, the only reliable means of thwarting
the deadly human immunodeficiency virus is by preventing its transmission
from one person to another.

But the brutal reality is that simply teaching the public how AIDS is
contracted turns out to be a woefully inadequate strategy for halting the
epidemic's spread.  To actually change dangerous behavior, prevention
messages must be carefully crafted to take into account the audiences' gender,
race, culture, economic status, level of drug use and sexual practices.

Thanks to the Capitol Cowards though, AIDS-prevention specialists still
operate in the dark in aiming their messages,   They're unsure how safer-sex
campaigns tailored for white gay men should be revised to be persuasive with,
say , the wives of heroin users.

"Nationally representative data on sexual and substance-using behaviors are
still unavailable, so it is impossible to estimate with any accuracy how many
people are indeed at risk for HIV infection from any particular behaviors," 
explains AIDS and Behavior, a new report from the prestigious National
Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine.  "Until these kinds of data exist, it
will be difficult... to design and target truly effective HIV interventions."

The National Institutes of Health proposed a comprehensive survey of adult
sexual practices as far back as July 1987, when the nation's AIDS caseload
was 44,079 and death toll 26,809.  As AIDS and Behavior converts that
proposal into a profound pleas, the ever-rising caseload is 361,164.  Already
220,736 American have died.

New Light will be shed on sexual practices this October with the publication of
"Sex in America" (Little, Brown), the results of 90-minute interviews with
3,432 adults.  But University of Chicago sociologist Ed Laumann, that study's
chief researcher, says 14,000 to 20,000 adults need to be surveyed to truly
illuminate who is at risk for AIDS.

Without Uncle Sam's money, a large-scale study detailed enough to guide
AIDS-prevention work is virtually impossible.  Until Sen. Helms and
then-Rep. William Dannemeyer, R-Orange County, intervened in 1991, a
federal survey of adult sexuality and another focusing on teenagers were
planned.  Under pressure, the Bush administration tabled the teen poll.

Then Helms browbeat colleagues, offering a "clear choice" between
cancellation of both surveys or "support for homosexuality and sexual
decadence."  He won on a 66-34 vote in 1992.

Vainly trying to keep cowardly senators from voting the next year to make
Helms' survey ban permanent, Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., warned: "There are
lives a stake here.  We are not going to protect ourselves through ignorance." 
Helms won again, 51 to 46.

Let's survey our own members of Congress and give them a really clear
choice" Bravely battling AIDS or pandering to ignorance.  We must write the
political epitaphs of the cowards.  They are a threat to us all.

Deb Price is openly lesbian journalist writing for the Washington bureau of the
Detroit News.  Contact her by writing to:  GNS Features, 1000 Wilson Blvd.,
Arlington, VA  2229-00001

Copyright  1994, The Detroit News.