Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 9, 1994 TAG: 9403100022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cal Thomas
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In a memo to the State Department, Dr. Lee refers to people carrying the HIV virus as suffering from a ``disability.'' He thinks athletes infected with HIV should be excepted from regulations that exclude anyone with a ``communicable disease of public health significance.''
Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman Duke Austin says his agency will draw up visa guidelines. A request then will be made to Attorney General Janet Reno to use the waiver powers of her office to grant permission for HIV carriers to come to America for the Gay Games and related events the same week. Those include the 16th annual International Lesbian and Gay Association world conference and Stonewall, a celebration of the 25th anniversary of an uprising at the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar.
Justice Department spokesman Carl Stern tells me Reno has not heard from INS, and until she does she cannot make a decision.
The gay lobby, which has considerable clout in the Clinton administration, is seeking an exception not granted to any other disease. It is asking that infection with HIV virus be treated not as a medical issue but as a political one. It wants people carrying HIV placed not in medical isolation but in political isolation, protecting them from an accountability that someone with, say, tuberculosis or hepatitis would be forced to face.
If HIV carriers are allowed to enter the United States for the Gay Games, presumably they will not be allowed to bring with them fruit, plants or animals. Unless regulations are further relaxed, a customs officer will confiscate such items. That recently happened to me when a customs officer seized some oranges I tried to bring into Israel from Egypt.
Most nations ban such items brought in by travelers precisely because they can carry diseases or bugs deemed a threat to uninfected people, plants or animals. Even domestic threats to fruit, as in the case of the California Medfly infestation a few years ago, are immediately attacked with every weapon government and private citizens can muster, including quarantine and a ban on transporting fruit in or out of infected zones.
If AIDS is the deadly plague the gay lobby continues to claim it is - in order to intimidate government into spending more tax dollars on finding a cure - then why isn't it serious enough to keep people testing positive for the HIV virus that causes it from entering the country and possibly putting people who are not infected at risk? Will those carrying the virus who attend the games be required to make a pledge of either celibacy or ``safe sex'' while they are here?
What is needed in the matter of the Gay Games is strong leadership from the attorney general - who withered when faced with Whitewatergate. Reno will be pressured to grant the exception to HIV carriers by those within the administration who think homosexuals are deserving of special treatment, even in matters of public health.
This is too important an issue to be allowed the precedent of special treatment and favored consideration. The immigration rules must not be bent for a single group and a single disease. That would make a mockery of medicine, of immigration and of the public health and safety of most Americans, including those who are HIV-negative.
\ Los Angeles Times Syndicate
by CNB