AIDS&Marriage

Patricia Nell Warren’s Left Field

The minute Bush was inaugurated, Congress re-introduced the Federal Marriage Amendment with arrogant speed. By February, the President’s State of the Union speech made it crystal clear—for anybody who wasn’t paying attention—that the Amendment’s supporters intend to re-establish state religion in the U.S. President Bush told us, “Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.”

According to Dubya and his church daddies, the “sanctity” of civil marriage must be protected from those bad homos. Where is the logic? LGBT activists are asking for civil marriage, which is a legal contract between two people. As such, it isn’t any more “sacred” than your auto-loan contract with a bank. Any student of Western history knows this. Starting in the eighteenth century, as civil marriage was adopted by various Western nations (including the brand-new U.S.), growing numbers of their citizens wanted family life to be free from meddling by organized religion. Couples who wanted “sanctity” could add a church service at their own discretion.

Taking contempt for logic a step farther, the religious right uses AIDS to argue against LGBT people tying the knot. Legalizing “unhealthy lifestyles” (they claim) will lead to more AIDS. In other words, their position is that committed legal relationships among gay people will only result in HIV infection. Their logic is as twisted as a hangman’s rope. You might as well say that encouraging heterosexuals to marry would also result in disease.

The Marriage Amendment has top priority, right up there with Social Security and the Iraq war. Americans who favor same-sex marriage, or who feel that amending the Constitution this way is a bad idea, are making their counter-arguments to Congress. But the “enemies of unhealthy lifestyles” (I’ll call them EOULs for short) aren’t listening. They believe God has given them the right to run the country.

EOULs don’t even bother looking at the latest AIDS statistics from the government they want to control. In San Francisco, for example, the Department of Public Health states that HIV infection rates among gay and bi men have leveled out for some time now. Did the EOULs rejoice a little at this official good news? No way. After Mayor Gavin Newsom bravely authorized city officials to perform same-sex marriages, those wet-blanket EOULs got the marriages invalidated. In Michigan, Gary Glenn, president of American Family there, blatantly inflated his quote on the Detroit gay/bi AIDS rate to sixty-one percent, when the Michigan Department of Community Health’s report had pegged it at forty-four percent and declining.

Federal statistics don’t figure in EOUL logic either. Latest CDC figures show that the big infection spike is among heterosexuals and African-Americans. As readers of this column know, I don’t trust CDC numbers…but they do represent the government’s official position. However, since these figures don’t advance EOUL arguments, the EOULs simply ignore them. Recognizing heterosexual black HIV rates doesn’t add up to “protecting the traditional institution of marriage,” and the EOULs know it.

EOULs direct most of their wrath at gay and bi men, but they also want to deny civil marriage to lesbians. Yet lesbians seldom get AIDS. The CDC has the same luck finding a lesbian AIDS epidemic

than Bush has finding those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Today the agency’s Web site still says, with a note of weary resignation, “Female-to-female transmission of HIV appears to be a rare occurrence.”

Last but not least, EOULS insist that transgender and intersex people must be barred from civil marriage. Clearly the vast differences between sexual orientation and gender identity, and the chromosomal variations that some people are born with, that are so painfully, profoundly clear to those who live with them every day, are over the heads of your average EOUL. In a recent Special Report, the Traditional Values Coalition protested fiercely at the presence of transgender people in AIDS programs they didn’t approve of. Yet many trans and intersex people don’t identify as “gay” or “lesbian.”

In short, it’s “logic” as practiced by an administration that also plans to establish democracy in Iraq by trashing the country, then turning its “reconstruction” and natural resources over to a pack of multinational corporations. Veteran investigative reporter Jon Rappoport calls it “the logic of agenda.” In a recent commentary, Rappoport said, “Beliefs can become overriding agendas that then conveniently meld with what is taken to be ‘a case in point.’ In this instance, HIV. You absorb a general idea, decide it’s true, and then use it as a magnet to attract specifics. You come to the conclusion that this is how logic is supposed to work.”

Earlier this year, distinguished long-time commentator Bill Moyers, who has scrutinized the American scene since the sixties, put it a little differently. He said acidly: “For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality.”

EOUL defiance of logic ranges from D.C. to every state where the marriage battle is being waged. As I write this, Illinois just passed its SB 3186, which elevates sexual orientation to protected status. Illinois EOULs are having fits about it, and predict that Illinois is doomed to follow Massachusetts to same-sex marriage approval. They’re dragging out every inaccurate and overwrought AIDS “fact” they can cook up.

In his State of the Union speech, Bush called for the Ryan White Act to be re-authorized—but on his terms. Translated from Bushese, his remarks tell us that the Act will be re-tooled to specs of the religious right. The Traditional Values Coalition lists some of their specifics on their Web site, including: “defund all AIDS groups operated by activist homosexuals, and stigmatize homosexual sex as a public-health hazard.”

And that, my friends, will be AIDS policy as dictated by state religion.

AIDS & Marriage