Paul Gann’s Crusade Against AIDS

Once again, a striking example of the reckless and vindictive mentality of the American Right. Anti-tax “crusader” Paul Gann is missing the point entirely about some of the implications of his tragic affliction with AIDS. At his press conference, sitting next to state Sen. John Doolittle of Citrus Heights, the “conservative” chairman of the Senate Republican Caucus, Gann vows to devote all of his energies in his “last campaign” to “testing everyone and everything,” and calling for murder sentences for those who carelessly spread the disease.

What about calling for immediate, massive, expanded research, for more education, for more services for those who are suffering and who are so desperately in need of them?

The real criminals are not those who unknowingly donated tainted blood, but those government officials, such as President Reagan, Gov. George Deukmejian and Supervisor Mike Antonovich, whose response to the crisis of the last seven years has been shamefully neglectful, contemptuous and hostile; amounting to an unrelenting attack on the victims of the plague rather than on the plague itself.

One might have concluded that now that some straight, white, male, Republican super-citizen (one of Reagan’s own) has contracted AIDS, the immediacy and the scope of the problem might finally have been brought home to the constricted minds of those in charge.

Gann’s personal suffering from this terrible disease is profoundly sad; that his impassioned but misguided comments might contribute to additional unnecessary suffering for thousands of people, that these remarks might inspire even more confusion and inappropriate actions on the part of people such as Doolittle or the crazed demagogue Lyndon La Rouche, is sadder still.

NICK ZONEN

Venice