Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Human Rights Law Blogs -> Never In Our Names

Human Rights Law

: Never In Our Names

Senate removes PEPFAR funding, lifts HIV travel ban

By sad pony guerilla girl

Today the Senate reauthorized the PEPFAR, giving it $50B over the next 5 years to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria abroad.

The bill also included a provision to lift the HIV travel ban (which severely restricts the ability for seropositive people to travel between and immigrate to the US) and struck down a provision in the older version that called for a third of the funding to be used for abstinence-only education.

All in all, a good bill got through. It's already passed the House and the president is expected to sign it. Done, done, and done.

Since this is my first diary on a human rights site, I ought to go a bit deeper on what this says about the lines we draw around human rights to restrict, control, and eliminate people we don't like or who don't have power.

Just yesterday, the LGBT blogosphere was up in arms over Elizabeth Dole's amendment to name the bill after Jesse Helms. Back when Ronald Reagan was turning a tin ear to the growing AIDS crisis in the US, Jesse Helms was instrumental in helping Congress do the same. His bombastic "round 'em up, put 'em on an island, and nuke 'em" rhetoric was a great way for many to ignore the bodies piling up and entire communities dying tragically young.
JMG has a good round-up of some of Helms's comments:

Jesse Helms, the man who in 1987 described AIDS prevention literature as "so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up."

Jesse Helms, the man who in 1988 vigorously opposed the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS research bill, saying, "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy."

Jesse Helms, the man who in 1995 said (in opposition to refunding the Ryan White Act) that the government should spend less on people with AIDS because they got sick due to their "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct."

Helms never liked gay people, and while he did eventually come around to support funding to fight HIV abroad, he never changed his mind that gay HIV victims in the US got what they deserve:

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) said his comments regarding being ashamed about his inaction on the AIDS epidemic didn't mean he altered his views on homosexuality or his belief that government spending on AIDS research is excessive compared to spending on other illnesses. "I don't have any idea on changing my views on that kind of activity, which is the primary cause of the doubling and redoubling of AIDS cases in the United States," Helms said. During a Christian conference in Washington last month, Helms said he had been "too lax too long in doing something really significant about AIDS." But on Tuesday, Helms said those comments were focused on the epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa and didn't apply to domestic AIDS issues involving homosexuals.

Senator Dole's amendment to name the PEPFAR reauthorization after him was another GOP attempt to change a conservative's legacy posthumously, like they did to Reagan's. And all the while she could play innocent and say that since the bill supported international HIV funding, and Helms supported international HIV funding, then it all makes sense.

Her amendment didn't pass, but it's not like the logic was called out:

Once a politically contentious issue, fighting AIDS has become popular at both ends of the ideological spectrum. During the debate, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, praised former senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a conservative icon who died July 4, for his decision in 2000 to support global AIDS funding.

The distinction that Jesse Helms, and too many people like him, made between the worthy sick and the unworthy sick is pretty sickening in and of itself. Besides the fact that he was accepting death for one group of people that he didn't like, he was also casting himself as the final arbiter on who should live and who should die.

In his memoirs, Helms said that Bono (yes, of U2) helped persuade him to vote for HIV funding in 2000 because:

In the memoir, the man nicknamed "Senator No" because he regularly opposed initiatives promoted both by Republican and Democratic administrations recounts how he came to change his views on the spread of AIDS and to support using federal money to fight the disease.

"It had been my feeling that AIDS was a disease largely spread by reckless and voluntary sexual and drug-abusing behavior, and that it would probably be confined to those in high-risk populations," Mr. Helms said. "I was wrong."

Because those folks deserve to die. Africans, who apparently can't choose their behavior like Americans can, don't.

Besides the insulting (and racist) idea that Africans don't know better than to get HIV, Helms in that quotation betrayed a stunning lack of commitment to human life. "Only the people I want to help" isn't a commitment to fighting HIV. It's a commitment to push another agenda that momentarily lines up with others' commitments to fight HIV.

Conditioning the value of someone's life on their choices falls apart under analysis of what exactly constitutes a choice or not. Why did man-on-man sex make someone responsible for getting the disease but heterosexual sex didn't? Do we have 100% control over our sexual attractions or behavior? Can we ask people to go without sexual contact? Should we expect people to live their lives concerned with bare survival at-all-costs or else we won't help them? What behaviors that possibly lead to death can be accepted and what behaviors that possibly lead to death can't?

Or, more simply, how deep is our commitment to human life?

I'm not really surprised that Dole would try to get an amendment like that through to help out another Republican from her state. But for Kerry, and who knows how many others, to see Helms's conditional commitment to human life as anything other than an attempt to discipline and control, to divide and conquer, then we've got a lot of work ahead of us to renew America's commitment to human rights.  

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on July 17, 2008 (boomark / email).