Invasion of Privacy

One of the difficulties with HIV prevention, as I have suggested below, is that it is essential to talk with people about very private matters that most of us do not like to discuss with strangers. It is necessary to ask them to reveal things about themselves that much of society considers shameful, and condemns -- reasons why schoolchildren beat up their classmates and stuff them upside down in garbage cans, reasons why preachers declare that they are damned to eternal torture at the hands of Almight God (the compassionate, the merciful), reasons why they may be fired from jobs, incarcerated, or murdered.

What is more, in order for epidemiologists to understand the course of the epidemic, for program managers to allocate funding, for supervisors to know if their efforts are working, all of this information has to be written down and analyzed, which today means entered into computers. In order to really make sense of it, we need to have some way of keeping track of individuals as they move through programs and from service to service. If this is to work, it requires mutual trust, honesty, and absolute avoidance of any moral condemnation, which is the mortal enemy of humanity in the context of this epidemic. I don't know of anybody who wants to be a drug addict or a prostitute, or who chose to be homosexual. These are what people are. Addiction is ultimately self-destructive, and prostitution is not the most rewarding possible expression of sexuality. Homosexuality is just homosexuality. But casting any of these as moral issues only harms the people so condemned, the people doing the condemning, and the public health, which means the health of all of us and of society.

Unfortunately, many members of the Congress and many political appointees within the Department of Health and Human Services are committed to moral condemnation. They are trying to translate it into policy. This is as dangerous as war, as dangerous as environmental depradations, as dangerous as poverty and ignorance.