John: Why do you stop us on the king’s highway and refuse us leave to go on our way?
–Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
The manager of a furniture store is fired because the owners suspect that he has developed the disease.
No one doubts anymore that AIDS is a public-health problem of massive and growing proportions. But it is also a civil rights problem–and those two problems are inextricably linked. Health considerations invariably get first priority: AIDS is serious business, and it has to be stopped. So if a few people get their feelings or their rights stepped on, goes the argument, that’s tough. “Are we serious about stopping this epidemic or aren’t we?” asks state representative Penny Pullen of Park Ridge, a member of the commission on the HIV problem appointed by President Reagan. “We’re not going to stop it by ignorance or by doing nothing!”
“I think we’re going to find that the cases of discrimination uncovered so far represent the tip of the iceberg,” says Hammell. “What we need is an expansion of antidiscrimination laws, not more encouragement for repression.”
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Some notoriety also attended the 1987 removal of a first-grade student with AIDS from his normal class in a public school in downstate Belleville. ACLU lawyers in this instance too claimed discrimination against the handicapped, and provided a battery of medical experts who said the child, identified only as “Johnny Doe,” posed no real threat to other students or to teachers. The school district subsequently yielded and even agreed last year to pay Johnny $7,500 in damages.
