Landmark Ordinance Banning Bias Against AIDS Victims Signed

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley signed a landmark ordinance Friday banning discrimination against AIDS victims, saying the law is not meant to punish but to educate the public about the deadly disease.

The far-reaching ordinance, which took immediate effect, prohibits schools from shunning AIDS victims or their siblings. It bars restaurants from turning down customers with the disease or those merely suspected of having AIDS. And it bans landlords from evicting tenants with the deadly ailment or refusing to rent to AIDS sufferers. Dentists, doctors and other medical workers also are covered by the ordinance.

The law--believed to be the nation’s first--also subjects businesses and government agencies to possible lawsuits by the city attorney’s office if they refuse to hire or serve people with AIDS.

“The purpose is not to punish, not to file lawsuits but to help educate,” Bradley said at a City Hall news conference. “And if the process accomplishes that, I think we will be a long step forward in the battle to deal with this very serious problem.”

He added, “I think what we must attempt to make clear here is that misinformation, public apprehension, hysteria are the enemies, not the AIDS victims.”

The mayor was joined by Councilman Joel Wachs, the law’s author, and Dr. Shirley Fannin, deputy director of communicable disease control for Los Angeles County, who said the law should help calm public anxiety over acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Fannin, who helped draft the ordinance, emphasized that the law seeks to reassure people that the disease cannot be transmitted through casual contact but only through a “significant exchange of blood and blood products and through sexual activity.”

The law states, in part:

”. . . medical studies of family groups in which one or more persons have been diagnosed with AIDS show no spread of the virus other than through sexual intimacy or through the exchange of blood (mother to fetus).” And it notes that “. . . the virus can thrive only in favorable conditions and cannot exist for a significant period of time outside the body, and can be protected against by the application of regular practices of hygiene, such as the use of chlorine in swimming pools or spas and the use of household bleach when washing garments or cleaning contaminated surfaces.”

Wachs pushed for the ordinance after AIDS victims complained of being fired from their jobs and refused service at bars and restaurants. There also were reports of AIDS sufferers being left to die in abandoned cars because nursing homes or hospices would not admit them and of paramedics and ambulance drivers refusing to treat AIDS patients.

And Wachs told reporters Friday that a television camera crew had expressed reluctance to cover a council meeting on AIDS because of fears that AIDS victims would be present. “That is absolutely the kind of ludicrous, unreasonable fear that we are going to stop,” he said.

Wachs said officials in 30 other cities have requested copies of the Los Angeles law.

The city attorney’s office will handle AIDS discrimination complaints and will try to mediate disputes. If that fails, the city attorney could file a temporary restraining order to stop the alleged discriminatory practice and then file a lawsuit that could result in punitive or actual monetary damages.

Blood Banks Exempted

Exemptions in the ordinance include owner-occupied housing or such medical facilities as blood banks, organ donation centers or any “establishment engaged in the exchange of products containing elements of blood or sperm.”

After the mayor’s news conference, Donald Peaslee, who said he is suffering from an AIDS-related cancer, told reporters that he would use the new law to challenge his eviction from the Silver Lake house he now rents.

“I’m at the point I can’t afford to move, I don’t have the means to move, I don’t have the strength to move and I think if I start moving . . . it’s just going to bring on another infection and I’ll wind up back in the hospital,” Peaslee said.

Thursday night, the West Hollywood City Council passed a similar ordinance but included a provision calling for civil penalties ranging from $250 to $10,000 fines against violators. City officials there also intend to sponsor public seminars on AIDS and use billboards to dispel myths about the disease.

A recent report by the county Health Services Department found 371 AIDS cases in the Hollywood-Wilshire area, which includes West Hollywood, Hollywood and part of the Wilshire District. Those cases make up more than a third of the 1,060 known AIDS cases in the county.