Schabarum View on Aids

County Supervisor Pete Schabarum has rapped The Times across the cheek with his glove. “I challenge you,” he says (Letters, Sept. 16), if you want the public to pay for the gays’ AIDS pamphlet, “to say so in an editorial and to print its contents so your readers can judge for themselves.”

The two-part nature of this challenge (say so and print) underlines what Schabarum himself admits is his basic reason for voting against “Mother’s Handy Sex Guide:” He feels taxpayers (read that as “voters”) looking at it would doubt whether it is a proper product of public funds.

The true issue, of course, is whether this pamphlet provides one of the most effective means of educating its target population, and this is not best tested by appealing to the reaction of the average taxpayer.

I would not find the pamphlet proper in my home or in my Times. That is not the issue, although Schabarum would like to make that the issue, as he attempts to do in his “challenge.” The pamphlet may be excellent or unnecessarily salacious. I lack the expertise to judge, although it must be infinitely better than nothing, for lives are being lost each day.

RICHARD O’CONNELL

Sepulveda