U.S. Rights Aide Charges Gay Bias, Quits

A top federal civil rights official based in San Francisco, accusing the Department of Health and Human Services of bias against homosexuals, has resigned in protest over what he said was the department’s failure to apply anti-discrimination rules for the handicapped to AIDS victims.

“To protect the rights of AIDS patients is to protect the rights of gay people, in their minds, and I don’t think they want to do that,” said Hal M. Freeman, regional manager of the department’s Office for Civil Rights in San Francisco, whose jurisdiction covers California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and the trust territories in the Pacific.

“I just don’t think I can live with the policy,” Freeman added in a telephone interview Friday.

He said he was quitting because the department has refused to apply Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to people with AIDS. The statute prohibits federal agencies and those receiving federal funds from discriminating against the handicapped.

Heart Disease

He said the law has often been applied to people with infectious illnesses, such as leprosy and tuberculosis, as well as heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

In a Thursday letter to Betty Lou Dotson, director of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, Freeman wrote: “I’m concerned that this decision to move ‘cautiously’ is politically motivated and stems in part from prejudice toward gay people and the concomitant erroneous assumption that AIDS is a gay disease.”

Despite repeated attempts, Dotson could not be reached for comment.

“I think if this were any other disease, such as legionnaire’s disease or toxic shock syndrome, and we were finding that the legionnaires were being discriminated against because they were sick, I don’t think the reaction would be the same,” Freeman said.

Freeman, 49, who has worked for the department for 18 years, said the first AIDS-related discrimination case brought to the department was filed in Atlanta by a male nurse with the disease who was forced out on medical leave. The case is still unresolved, he said.

‘Being Harassed’

Freeman said a complaint was filed in his office last December by “an openly gay man who did not have AIDS, but who claimed he was being harassed by co-workers as if he were diseased.”

In his letter to Dotson, Freeman charged that “your office stated that this complaint did not fall under Section 504 since the complainant did not actually have AIDS and therefore could not be considered handicapped.”

The letter continued: “One of the statutory and regulatory definitions of ‘handicapped person’ is ‘any person . . . who is regarded as having such a (physical) impairment,’ meaning persons who have no physical or mental impairment but are treated by a recipient of federal funds as if they were handicapped.”

Since 1982, the Reagan Administration has sought to apply Section 504 to the treatment of so-called “Baby Doe” cases, allowing the federal government to regulate the care of severely handicapped infants.

‘Plain Politics’

California Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health, called the civil rights office “an arm of plain politics.”

“If the anti-abortion groups are concerned--as they were in Baby Doe rules--then the Administration can’t move quickly enough,” he added