Unfairness on AIDS

It seems on the surface reasonable enough that the federal government would make an exception for its rules against employment discrimination in the case of people with communicable diseases. But the Justice Department memorandum applying that exception to victims of AIDS is unreasonable.

AIDS is a communicable disease, but not in the run-of-the-mill sense of the word communicable . You get it only from intimate sexual contact or directly from contaminated blood, such as by drug users’ sharing unsterile needles or by transfusion--a danger now thought to have been almost entirely eliminated. No one is known to have contracted AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, in any other way. People who have lived in the same house with an AIDS victim--used the same dishes, linens, towels and so forth--have not gotten AIDS, or even picked up the virus that causes it.

Government health authorities, including the Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, have taken great pains to explain as precisely as possible just how this fear-some disease is--and is not--communicated.

Acting without a shred of scientific or medical evidence, the Justice Department has undermined the painstaking approach by the government’s scientific and medical authorities. The department’s motive may be an excess of caution, lest future research should indicate that AIDS is spread in ways not now known, or the motive may be more disreputable--an appeal to the constituency, which we believe to be relatively small, that takes satisfaction in the current anguish of male homosexuals, whom the disease chiefly afflicts.

The Justice Department memo seems to us to be unworkable on its face. It says that if you discriminate against a person with AIDS you cannot be charged with discrimination under the applicable civil-rights laws if you think that AIDS is contagious in the usual way, even though it isn’t, and you fire an AIDS victim. That both presents an impossibly tangled legal situation and opens the way for needless and hurtful discrimination against AIDS victims, who already suffer tortures that none of us would wish for anyone.

You can be sure that if the evidence about AIDS contagion changes, government and medical advice will change. As far as any researcher knows, that is not in prospect. Under the circumstances it ill behooves the Department of Justice to permit employers to fire people with AIDS based on fear of contagion when there is no evidence at all that such fear has any basis in fact.

Government health agencies on Wednesday forcefully rebutted the premises of the Justice Department’s position. Let the department do the straightforward and decent thing, and change its mind.

And let Californians now prepare to defeat at the November election the harshly punitive initiative, which appears to have qualified, against anyone suspected of carrying the AIDS virus. The initiative is the handiwork of followers of the extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.