It is a shame that the New York State Assembly has adjourned without voting on an important piece of legislation that would make it easier to screen those receiving medical care for HIV. It is not often that we have occasion to commend the works of a liberal New York City Democrat and former National Organization for Women Legislator of the Year, but assemblywoman Nettie Mayersohn deserves the support of Right and Left in her project to make HIV screening a routine medical procedure that is widely and consistently performed.
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As it stands, physicians are required to ask their patients fill out additional authorization paperwork before an HIV screening can be conducted. In this, as in so many other ways, the treatment of HIV/AIDS is unlike that of most other diseases. (You don’t need extra paperwork to get a cholesterol test.) The situation is in part understandable; there is nothing shameful about contracting a virus, but the AIDS epidemic’s early association with homosexuals, prostitutes, and intravenous drug users elevated privacy concerns. But such concerns have to be balanced by our public authorities’ obligation to reduce the incidence of the disease through the most effective measure at their disposal: information. Under Mayersohn’s proposal, HIV screening would be covered by the general consent to medical treatment signed by patients as a matter of course. The results of such HIV screening would still enjoy all the privacy protections related to other medical facts. Instead of being asked to take extra steps in order to opt in for HIV screening, patients would have the ability to opt out.
Who could be against such a proposal? Scads of people, it turns out, among them the same National Organization for Women that once made Mayersohn its Legislator of the Year. NOW, the ACLU, and a number of homosexual-rights organizations have consistently opposed Mayersohn’s efforts to make HIV screening more routine. She first successfully proposed legislation to require health-care agencies, to the extent that they are able, to inform HIV patients’ spouses and other sexual partners if they are being exposed to the deadly virus. Later, Mayersohn fought to abolish rules that prevented doctors from informing the parents of newborns that the child or mother had HIV, even though HIV-positive newborns were already being identified through a blind-testing program. NOW and the ACLU opposed that, too — an act of politically inspired stupidity that caused the famed
Village Voice writer Nat Hentoff to quit the ACLU in disgust. So virulent was the opposition to this proposal that dozens of protesters rallied outside Mayersohn’s apartment building at midnight on World AIDS Day, screaming invectives at one of the most pro-gay politicians in New York.
What gives?
The answer is “AIDS exceptionalism,” a poisonous hothouse flower of gay-identity politics that insists that AIDS be treated differently from any other disease. AIDS advocacy employs thousands and thousands of people, and AIDS activists have been masterful in wringing money out the system for uses that are related to AIDS in only the most tangential fashion. A
New York Times story on AIDS exceptionalism found FEMA money being used to underwrite candlelight dinners at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis center in New York, which was also providing such services as haircuts and tickets to Broadway shows. The same sense of exceptionalism insists that screening and public-health efforts related to AIDS be constrained by rules that do not apply to cancer or typhus or other less politically fraught diseases.
We should do what we can to help people with HIV receive treatment. Informing them that they have the disease is an essential first step. The New York State Medical Society backs Mayersohn’s efforts to make HIV screening a routine medical matter requiring no exceptional consent protocols. Once again, common sense and sound medicine are with the honorable lady from Queens.
